Untitled (Racing Form 1 - 9)

Artist Sadie Barnette grew up visiting the Hollywood Park Racetrack in Inglewood, California with her father. “I’ve always been fascinated by the racetrack,” she explains. “I used to go with my dad when I was little and it’s a very interesting place because there’s a melding of very specific vernacular and very serious betting and statistics and codes, but then there is also this fantastical, mythic element of the horses themselves and the poetry of the names they are given, which can be very over-the-top and showy or moody and stoic.” Barnette made the nine drawings in the series using actual race form pages from booklets available for purchase at the track. The numbers 1–9 overlaid on the pages allude not only to the number assigned to individual horses, but also to the statistics used by spectators to create elaborate equations to handicap the odds. As Barnette explains, “I wanted the many obsessive hours of my drawing labor to match the obsessive nature of gambling.” Barnette has described the racetrack as a space where escapism, fantasy, and chance collide with everyday realities of class in America.