1 00:00:09,720 --> 00:00:11,000 [Jacolby Satterwhite, Artist] 2 00:00:11,000 --> 00:00:13,540 So that's what I do when you guys aren't around. 3 00:00:18,140 --> 00:00:20,060 I think we're in the age of the remix. 4 00:00:20,060 --> 00:00:22,860 There’s no such thing as originality anymore. 5 00:00:22,860 --> 00:00:26,780 And now it’s just about how you use the information around you 6 00:00:26,780 --> 00:00:29,040 to generate your individuality. 7 00:00:29,980 --> 00:00:36,840 Social media, technology, the Internet, the way that our bodies exist virtually-- 8 00:00:38,060 --> 00:00:42,700 it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity of the body. 9 00:00:46,390 --> 00:00:49,249 My body is multiplied several times in my videos-- 10 00:00:49,249 --> 00:00:51,170 not because I’m narcissistic, 11 00:00:51,170 --> 00:00:55,740 but it’s because I consider the videos to be similar to an essay. 12 00:00:56,500 --> 00:00:58,380 I feel like my body is a form of punctuation. 13 00:00:58,380 --> 00:01:01,720 They act as commas, exclamation points, question marks. 14 00:01:03,600 --> 00:01:07,060 ["Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self"] 15 00:01:07,070 --> 00:01:11,049 Virtual space for me is a queer arena for my body to perform in. 16 00:01:11,049 --> 00:01:14,870 Voguing is all about performing realness. 17 00:01:14,870 --> 00:01:20,070 I feel like there is a perfect parallel between my practice and the ball scene. 18 00:01:24,510 --> 00:01:26,690 When I perform in the green screen, 19 00:01:26,690 --> 00:01:31,430 it's usually freestyle but based on the objects that I see. 20 00:01:34,290 --> 00:01:38,130 Voguing is all about performing objects around you that aren’t there. 21 00:01:38,130 --> 00:01:42,520 The movement is so lyrical and it’s about drawing and accenting space. 22 00:01:42,520 --> 00:01:46,680 Dancing and movement is the closest thing to drawing that I could figure out. 23 00:01:50,060 --> 00:01:54,390 When I was growing up, the way that I started drawing was me trying to assist my mother 24 00:01:54,390 --> 00:01:57,840 in becoming a rich woman on the Home Shopping Network. 25 00:01:57,840 --> 00:02:01,910 [SUZANNE SOMERS] Well I say all the time, aging should be aspirational... 26 00:02:01,910 --> 00:02:06,159 [SATTERWHITE] My mother was watching Suzanne Somers telling Americans they can be an entrepreneur 27 00:02:06,159 --> 00:02:08,340 and make a million dollars. 28 00:02:08,340 --> 00:02:13,450 And so she started to make drawings of regular utilitarian objects. 29 00:02:13,450 --> 00:02:17,890 She was sending them off to companies, trying to get them invented. 30 00:02:17,890 --> 00:02:19,790 Find one my favorites in this batch. 31 00:02:19,790 --> 00:02:24,190 She’s made way more drawings than this, but this is a couple thousand. 32 00:02:24,190 --> 00:02:26,890 I started to realize that it wasn’t what I thought it was. 33 00:02:26,900 --> 00:02:36,920 And she became more troubled and she started to evolve into having a mental illness. 34 00:02:38,250 --> 00:02:42,330 The drawings became more of a necessary meditation. 35 00:02:42,330 --> 00:02:43,810 Keeping the chaos out of her head. 36 00:02:43,810 --> 00:02:48,140 Keeping her mind contained and focused. 37 00:02:52,740 --> 00:02:56,700 "The Matriarch’s Rhapsody" is based on my mother's drawings. 38 00:02:58,640 --> 00:03:01,740 The blurring of the authorship is super important for me. 39 00:03:05,510 --> 00:03:06,930 I work with her drawings because 40 00:03:06,930 --> 00:03:09,840 I want to make my work from a pure place that comes from necessity 41 00:03:09,840 --> 00:03:16,530 and comes from obsession and comes from the essential, barebones, necessary place that 42 00:03:16,530 --> 00:03:17,690 art should come from. 43 00:03:19,450 --> 00:03:20,599 Stuff that I grew up dealing with. 44 00:03:20,599 --> 00:03:23,520 It’s like J.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis books. 45 00:03:23,520 --> 00:03:26,520 "Final Fantasy" one through ten, and all the video games I played. 46 00:03:26,520 --> 00:03:30,290 There was always a strategy guide. A legend. 47 00:03:30,290 --> 00:03:34,930 I wanted to create my own codex of 250 of my mother’s drawings 48 00:03:34,930 --> 00:03:39,730 To contain that mythology that I am trying to manifest through art. 49 00:03:39,730 --> 00:03:44,870 I really want to make the most personal thing in my life my work. 50 00:03:44,870 --> 00:03:47,410 When I was a kid, I got diagnosed with cancer 51 00:03:47,410 --> 00:03:49,770 and I had to go through chemo for two years. 52 00:03:49,770 --> 00:03:52,410 And I lost my movement in my arm. 53 00:03:52,410 --> 00:03:54,670 So my body got disrupted. 54 00:03:56,140 --> 00:04:01,660 "Reifying Desire 3," I picked medical drawings that fix or heal the body, 55 00:04:01,660 --> 00:04:05,020 or enhance the performance of the body. 56 00:04:05,020 --> 00:04:09,930 And I gave myself two minutes to write a stream-of-conscious essay 57 00:04:09,930 --> 00:04:14,790 of how these drawings would blend with each other narratively. 58 00:04:14,790 --> 00:04:19,299 Kind of like "Exquisite Corpse" where you take different elements and you make into 59 00:04:19,299 --> 00:04:22,049 a uniform idea. 60 00:04:22,049 --> 00:04:24,590 Everyone has a system that they have to stay faithful to. 61 00:04:24,590 --> 00:04:26,540 It reveals things in my unconscious. 62 00:04:26,540 --> 00:04:29,860 It gives me a creative restraint to create a nonsensical storyline-- 63 00:04:29,860 --> 00:04:33,200 this unlimited sci-fi surrealist paradise. 64 00:04:40,000 --> 00:04:43,660 Another system is performing outdoors in public. 65 00:05:05,420 --> 00:05:08,100 The body that I'm performing as doesn’t understand limits. 66 00:05:09,840 --> 00:05:13,980 It’s about me taking the avatar out of the video and putting him in the world. 67 00:05:16,620 --> 00:05:21,720 How do I take that mundane urban environment and make it fantastical in my animation? 68 00:05:21,720 --> 00:05:27,620 I just took a trash bag outside and turned into a creature that has no trash bag breasts. 69 00:05:30,020 --> 00:05:33,260 When I go out, it’s like a sketchbook. 70 00:05:35,830 --> 00:05:38,139 I don’t know what’s gonna happen, 71 00:05:38,140 --> 00:05:40,760 But I know that when I get back with the footage, 72 00:05:40,760 --> 00:05:45,860 it’s going to inspire something that happens in my animation. 73 00:05:51,720 --> 00:05:56,900 Learning 3D animation really, really started cause I was obsessed with family footage. 74 00:05:59,940 --> 00:06:03,920 From the video, I notice I’m like constantly obsessed with hanging out with girls, 75 00:06:04,910 --> 00:06:08,560 and my cousins, and they’re kind of like excluding me and pushing me out. 76 00:06:08,560 --> 00:06:11,620 "No, Jacolby, you can’t! That’s what the girls do." 77 00:06:11,620 --> 00:06:16,160 I felt like this desperation to be loved and to belong 78 00:06:16,160 --> 00:06:18,580 is something I still, I think I still deal with today. 79 00:06:18,580 --> 00:06:22,580 So it’s kind of like, how do I re-perform all those bodies from my past? 80 00:06:23,400 --> 00:06:25,060 It’s like a reconstruction. 81 00:06:28,500 --> 00:06:33,620 In my "Country Ball" world, that’s where I really explore the possibility of queerness. 82 00:06:35,520 --> 00:06:40,500 So I said, "Okay, so I'm going to find twenty of my mother’s drawings" 83 00:06:40,500 --> 00:06:43,520 "that deal with recreational American material culture." 84 00:06:43,520 --> 00:06:51,940 "I’m going to find all of her drawings of grills, slides, sinks, carousels, TV, cakes." 85 00:06:51,940 --> 00:06:53,340 Lots of cakes. 86 00:06:55,660 --> 00:07:01,020 I’m removing her intentions of the drawings and combining them with my intentions. 87 00:07:02,660 --> 00:07:06,740 It’s interesting that her drawings were trying to subscribe to 88 00:07:06,740 --> 00:07:08,500 the most normal thing you can be. 89 00:07:08,500 --> 00:07:11,540 And when they enter my universes, they become something else. 90 00:07:11,540 --> 00:07:13,340 They become queered. 91 00:07:13,340 --> 00:07:16,800 It’s queering the purpose of the object. 92 00:07:16,800 --> 00:07:20,060 A cake becomes a skyscraper. 93 00:07:21,080 --> 00:07:23,840 Women into hermaphrodites. 94 00:07:31,500 --> 00:07:35,800 Torture, gestation, transformation, world-building. 95 00:07:35,800 --> 00:07:40,350 They’re all recurring themes that I love to explore subconsciously in the work. 96 00:07:40,350 --> 00:07:45,460 I know that my personal narrative is almost like a fantasy novel, 97 00:07:45,460 --> 00:07:49,240 because it’s so loaded with these weird, esoteric things. 98 00:07:49,240 --> 00:07:52,540 But at the same time, the narrative I’m most interested in 99 00:07:52,550 --> 00:07:57,390 is what happens when drawing, performance, and animation intersect. 100 00:08:01,800 --> 00:08:06,840 And I want to figure out how can I take the character from my videos, 101 00:08:06,850 --> 00:08:09,670 put it into the real world, and figure out 102 00:08:09,670 --> 00:08:11,740 how do I turn them all into participants in the video? 103 00:08:11,740 --> 00:08:14,600 And I feel like by me actually participating in that space, 104 00:08:14,600 --> 00:08:16,100 while they’re watching those videos, 105 00:08:16,110 --> 00:08:18,710 it takes it from one dimension to the next. 106 00:08:20,040 --> 00:08:23,720 It’s like one of those things that I continue to ask myself: 107 00:08:24,320 --> 00:08:26,869 "How am I extending the frame?" 108 00:08:30,389 --> 00:08:34,949 I am what you call an extended frame video installation performance diva. 109 00:08:37,520 --> 00:08:39,700 I’m chilling with my New Humans. 110 00:08:39,700 --> 00:08:41,740 They my niggas from the South 111 00:08:41,740 --> 00:08:43,940 They know what it’s about. 112 00:08:43,950 --> 00:08:47,080 They about that like a JTS Jacolby Satterwhite life. 113 00:08:48,660 --> 00:08:50,620 You know what, they know me from the back in the day 114 00:08:50,620 --> 00:08:52,900 When I did paintings 115 00:08:52,900 --> 00:08:54,900 But you don’t know what that’s like, ho, 116 00:08:54,900 --> 00:08:57,320 you don’t know, you don’t know what that’s like. 117 00:08:57,320 --> 00:08:58,111 Blog that shit.