Jacolby Satterwhite
A film accompaniment featuring songs from Perfume Genius' newest record, Ugly Season.
In the three years since her seminal album "A Seat at the Table", Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, "When I Get Home", the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange's case, that's the culturally rich Houston of her childhood. Some will know these references - candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw - via the city's mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange's lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art.
"A digital projection of hallucinatory visual complexity. Continuing a practice Satterwhite has developed over several years, the video is laboriously rendered in the animation software Maya, and includes green-screened performances by the artist and other nocturnal misfits. Like an erotic nightmare from the digital imaginary, the video plunges through warped dreamscapes populated by fornicating leather queens and monstrous, naked, tattooed giants. Satterwhite’s otherworld is one of torqued perspective and twisted physics, dazzling in both color and detail. Although too oneiric for any orderly narrative, the piece loosely follows a conveyor belt of sorts as it glides through a series of impossible architectures: from an abyssal atrium where figures hoverboard above a zigzag floor, to a labyrinthine freeway in the heavens, and further on to locales more miraculous still." -Gavin Brown's enterprise
"Jacolby Satterwhite’s vibrant work weaves together performance, animation, and personal ephemera. His videos and performances build on household or cosmetic products that his schizophrenic mother imagined and sketched. Satterwhite traces these objects and incorporates them into a virtual world filled with family videos and recordings of the artist dancing and vogue-ing in bright, tight body suits. 'There are limits with what you can do with objects, because objects are imbedded with history, politics and all kinds of anxiety,' he has said. 'To put myself in a virtual world is a political gesture, negating all those associations.' Satterwhite’s worlds evoke the escapism of Afro-futurism and suggest a posthuman quasiutopic virtual reality."
A two-channel epic: Birds in Paradise is a hybrid of 3D animated queer utopian dystopias and live-action cyber drag. Evoking an array of creative influences including Fluxus, Surrealist filmmakers, choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, voguing, Hieronymous Bosch, the video game Final Fantasy, and Daft Punk. Featuring a soundtrack with his mother Patricia’s a capella recordings remixed into syrupy thick dance beats, Satterwhite’s video brims with pleasurable contradictions and brutal indictments of our age of ever-impending apocalypse.
In Reifying Desire 6, (2014) Satterwhite continues his exploration of memory and personal narrative within a dynamic digital universe. Combining his own performance (drawn from ‘voguing’ and martial arts) with video, 3D animation and fantastical sculpture, Satterwhite blurs the boundaries between the life of the mind, the world of the images and the physical realm of bodies and objects. Within his videos, Satterwhite incorporates his mother’s drawings (diagrams for inventions and text exploring consumer culture medicine, sex, astrology, and philosophy) bringing their lines to life and intimately incorporating them in to his world. Reifying Desire 6 was shown at the Whitney Biennial 2014.
The latest installment in a six-part series, Reifying Desire 3 is a surrealist creation myth that stems from his ongoing collaboration with his mother. Satterwhite writes: “‘Reifying Desire 1–6’ will use 230 3-D modeled versions of my mother’s drawings, my body, and animated figures. The intersection of the disparate disciplines including dance performance, drawing, and digital media acts as an exquisite corpse strategy for guiding the storyline. Ordinary utilitarian objects become queered and repurposed in pursuit of defining a new utopian and nonpolitical space for me to perform in. The result is an overlap of visual trajectories between my mother and I—her private domestic documentations/inventions and my public reactions to pop culture, art history, and political histories.
Described by its maker as an "Hieronymus Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights–inspired landscape," Jacolby Satterwhite’s video abounds with a raucous and celebratory energy as it combines personal home movies of a family cookout, renditions of his mother’s drawings, and multiple simulations of himself dancing.
Interweaving digitally generated imagery with original footage, Shrines unfolds a late capitalist media landscape in which collective icons constitute and permeate both outside and inside worlds. Viral images from political news, pop, art, and film history invoke situations of biological threat and social tension, states of pharmacological dependence and carnal bondage. Moments of relief and liberation appear in analog film sequences in which Satterwhite stages his body as medium for processing these crisis-ridden realities. In this intersection of painting, performance, and video, Satterwhite continuously challenges a canon of Western art history, and proposes a possible mode of healing from systems of biopolitical, social and cultural exclusion.
