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[Jacolby Satterwhite, Artist]

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So that's what I do when you guys aren't around.

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I think we're in the age of the remix.

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There’s no such thing as originality anymore.

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And now it’s just about how you use the[br]information around you

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to generate your individuality.

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Social media, technology, the Internet, the[br]way that our bodies exist virtually--

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it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity[br]of the body.

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My body is multiplied several times in my[br]videos--

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not because I’m narcissistic,

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but it’s because I consider the videos to[br]be similar to an essay.

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I feel like my body is a form of punctuation.

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They act as commas, exclamation points, question[br]marks.

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["Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self"]

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Virtual space for me is a queer arena for[br]my body to perform in.

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Voguing is all about performing realness.

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I feel like there is a perfect parallel between[br]my practice and the ball scene.

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When I perform in the green screen,

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it's usually freestyle but based on the objects[br]that I see.

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Voguing is all about performing objects around[br]you that aren’t there.

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The movement is so lyrical and it’s about[br]drawing and accenting space.

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Dancing and movement is the closest thing[br]to drawing that I could figure out.

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When I was growing up, the way that I started[br]drawing was me trying to assist my mother

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in becoming a rich woman on the Home Shopping[br]Network.

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[SUZANNE SOMERS] Well I say all the time,[br]aging should be aspirational...

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[SATTERWHITE] My mother was watching Suzanne[br]Somers telling Americans they can be an entrepreneur

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and make a million dollars.

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And so she started to make drawings of regular[br]utilitarian objects.

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She was sending them off to companies, trying[br]to get them invented.

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Find one my favorites in this batch.

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She’s made way more drawings than this,[br]but this is a couple thousand.

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I started to realize that it wasn’t what[br]I thought it was.

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And she became more troubled and she started[br]to evolve into having a mental illness.

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The drawings became more of a necessary meditation.

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Keeping the chaos out of her head.

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Keeping her mind contained and focused.

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"The Matriarch’s Rhapsody" is based on my[br]mother's drawings.

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The blurring of the authorship is super important[br]for me.

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I work with her drawings because

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I want to make my work from a pure place that comes from necessity

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and comes from obsession and comes from the[br]essential, barebones, necessary place that

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art should come from.

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Stuff that I grew up dealing with.

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It’s like J.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis books.

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"Final Fantasy" one through ten, and all the[br]video games I played.

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There was always a strategy guide. A legend.

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I wanted to create my own codex of 250 of[br]my mother’s drawings

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To contain that mythology that I am trying[br]to manifest through art.

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I really want to make the most personal thing[br]in my life my work.

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When I was a kid, I got diagnosed with cancer

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and I had to go through chemo for two years.

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And I lost my movement in my arm.

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So my body got disrupted.

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"Reifying Desire 3," I picked medical drawings[br]that fix or heal the body,

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or enhance the performance of the body.

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And I gave myself two minutes to write a stream-of-conscious essay

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of how these drawings would blend with each[br]other narratively.

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Kind of like "Exquisite Corpse" where you[br]take different elements and you make into

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a uniform idea.

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Everyone has a system that they have to stay[br]faithful to.

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It reveals things in my unconscious.

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It gives me a creative restraint to create[br]a nonsensical storyline--

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this unlimited sci-fi surrealist paradise.

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Another system is performing outdoors in public.

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The body that I'm performing as doesn’t[br]understand limits.

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It’s about me taking the avatar out of the[br]video and putting him in the world.

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How do I take that mundane urban environment[br]and make it fantastical in my animation?

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I just took a trash bag outside and turned[br]into a creature that has no trash bag breasts.

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When I go out, it’s like a sketchbook.

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I don’t know what’s gonna happen,

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But I know that when I get back with the footage,

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it’s going to inspire something that happens in my animation.

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Learning 3D animation really, really started[br]cause I was obsessed with family footage.

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From the video, I notice I’m like constantly[br]obsessed with hanging out with girls,

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and my cousins, and they’re kind of like[br]excluding me and pushing me out.

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"No, Jacolby, you can’t! That’s what the[br]girls do."

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I felt like this desperation to be loved and[br]to belong

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is something I still, I think I still deal[br]with today.

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So it’s kind of like, how do I re-perform[br]all those bodies from my past?

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It’s like a reconstruction.

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In my "Country Ball" world, that’s where[br]I really explore the possibility of queerness.

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So I said, "Okay, so I'm going to find twenty[br]of my mother’s drawings"

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"that deal with recreational American material[br]culture."

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"I’m going to find all of her drawings of[br]grills, slides, sinks, carousels, TV, cakes."

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Lots of cakes.

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I’m removing her intentions of the drawings[br]and combining them with my intentions.

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It’s interesting that her drawings were[br]trying to subscribe to

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the most normal thing you can be.

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And when they enter my universes, they become[br]something else.

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They become queered.

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It’s queering the purpose of the object.

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A cake becomes a skyscraper.

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Women into hermaphrodites.

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Torture, gestation, transformation, world-building.

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They’re all recurring themes that I love[br]to explore subconsciously in the work.

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I know that my personal narrative is almost[br]like a fantasy novel,

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because it’s so loaded with these weird,[br]esoteric things.

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But at the same time, the narrative I’m[br]most interested in

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is what happens [br]when drawing, performance, and animation intersect.

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And I want to figure out how can I take the[br]character from my videos,

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put it into the real world, and figure out

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how do I turn them all into participants in the video?

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And I feel like by me actually participating[br]in that space,

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while they’re watching those videos,

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it takes it from one dimension to the next.

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It’s like one of those things that I continue[br]to ask myself:

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"How am I extending the frame?"

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I am what you call an extended frame video[br]installation performance diva.

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I’m chilling with my New Humans.

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They my niggas from the South

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They know what it’s about.

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They about that like a JTS Jacolby Satterwhite[br]life.

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You know what, they know me from the back[br]in the day

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When I did paintings

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But you don’t know what that’s like, ho,

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you don’t know, you don’t know what that’s like.

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Blog that shit.