Phantom Limb

Phantom Limb

Paintings and Drawings by Sarah Slappey

NOVEMBER 1 – 30, 2018

for the annual Homecoming Exhibition at START

Each year the START Gallery celebrates the achievements of successful alumni from the arts with a solo exhibition during Homecoming. START is proud to welcome back Sarah Slappey (‘06) to share her paintings and drawings in the 2018 Homecoming exhibition. Slappey studied Studio Art at Wake Forest, attending the university as a Presidential Scholar for Distinguished Achievement. She later earned an MFA in Painting from Hunter College. Slappey has shown her work in New York, London, Italy, and Denmark. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Often deploying saturated color and gestural “phantom limbs,” Sarah Slappey’s work probes the boundary between beauty and repulsion. Interweaving figurative motifs in alternately whimsical and foreboding spatial and chromatic configurations, Slappey views her painting as a language for talking about the sensations of the body, rather than looking at the figure through the lens of portraiture. Slappey cites the “very soft, beautiful” cinematography of contemporary horror films as a strong aesthetic influence and in this body of work views her project as an effort to illuminate the experiential paradox of the familiar and the strange.