[Jacolby Satterwhite, Artist]
So that's what I do when you guys aren't around.
I think we're in the age of the remix.
There’s no such thing as originality anymore.
And now it’s just about how you use the information around you
to generate your individuality.
Social media, technology, the Internet, the way that our bodies exist virtually--
it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity of the body.
My body is multiplied several times in my videos--
not because I’m narcissistic,
but it’s because I consider the videos to be similar to an essay.
I feel like my body is a form of punctuation.
They act as commas, exclamation points, question marks.
["Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self"]
Virtual space for me is a queer arena for my body to perform in.
Voguing is all about performing realness.
I feel like there is a perfect parallel between my practice and the ball scene.
When I perform in the green screen,
it's usually freestyle but based on the objects that I see.
Voguing is all about performing objects around you that aren’t there.
The movement is so lyrical and it’s about drawing and accenting space.
Dancing and movement is the closest thing to drawing that I could figure out.
When I was growing up, the way that I started drawing was me trying to assist my mother
in becoming a rich woman on the Home Shopping Network.
[SUZANNE SOMERS] Well I say all the time, aging should be aspirational...
[SATTERWHITE] My mother was watching Suzanne Somers telling Americans they can be an entrepreneur
and make a million dollars.
And so she started to make drawings of regular utilitarian objects.
She was sending them off to companies, trying to get them invented.
Find one my favorites in this batch.
She’s made way more drawings than this, but this is a couple thousand.
I started to realize that it wasn’t what I thought it was.
And she became more troubled and she started to evolve into having a mental illness.
The drawings became more of a necessary meditation.
Keeping the chaos out of her head.
Keeping her mind contained and focused.
"The Matriarch’s Rhapsody" is based on my mother's drawings.
The blurring of the authorship is super important for me.
I work with her drawings because
I want to make my work from a pure place that comes from necessity
and comes from obsession and comes from the essential, barebones, necessary place that
art should come from.
Stuff that I grew up dealing with.
It’s like J.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis books.
"Final Fantasy" one through ten, and all the video games I played.
There was always a strategy guide. A legend.
I wanted to create my own codex of 250 of my mother’s drawings
To contain that mythology that I am trying to manifest through art.
I really want to make the most personal thing in my life my work.
When I was a kid, I got diagnosed with cancer
and I had to go through chemo for two years.
And I lost my movement in my arm.
So my body got disrupted.
"Reifying Desire 3," I picked medical drawings that fix or heal the body,
or enhance the performance of the body.
And I gave myself two minutes to write a stream-of-conscious essay
of how these drawings would blend with each other narratively.
Kind of like "Exquisite Corpse" where you take different elements and you make into
a uniform idea.
Everyone has a system that they have to stay faithful to.
It reveals things in my unconscious.
It gives me a creative restraint to create a nonsensical storyline--
this unlimited sci-fi surrealist paradise.
Another system is performing outdoors in public.
The body that I'm performing as doesn’t understand limits.
It’s about me taking the avatar out of the video and putting him in the world.
How do I take that mundane urban environment and make it fantastical in my animation?
I just took a trash bag outside and turned into a creature that has no trash bag breasts.
When I go out, it’s like a sketchbook.
I don’t know what’s gonna happen,
But I know that when I get back with the footage,
it’s going to inspire something that happens in my animation.
Learning 3D animation really, really started cause I was obsessed with family footage.
From the video, I notice I’m like constantly obsessed with hanging out with girls,
and my cousins, and they’re kind of like excluding me and pushing me out.
"No, Jacolby, you can’t! That’s what the girls do."
I felt like this desperation to be loved and to belong
is something I still, I think I still deal with today.
So it’s kind of like, how do I re-perform all those bodies from my past?
It’s like a reconstruction.
In my "Country Ball" world, that’s where I really explore the possibility of queerness.
So I said, "Okay, so I'm going to find twenty of my mother’s drawings"
"that deal with recreational American material culture."
"I’m going to find all of her drawings of grills, slides, sinks, carousels, TV, cakes."
Lots of cakes.
I’m removing her intentions of the drawings and combining them with my intentions.
It’s interesting that her drawings were trying to subscribe to
the most normal thing you can be.
And when they enter my universes, they become something else.
They become queered.
It’s queering the purpose of the object.
A cake becomes a skyscraper.
Women into hermaphrodites.
Torture, gestation, transformation, world-building.
They’re all recurring themes that I love to explore subconsciously in the work.
I know that my personal narrative is almost like a fantasy novel,
because it’s so loaded with these weird, esoteric things.
But at the same time, the narrative I’m most interested in
is what happens when drawing, performance, and animation intersect.
And I want to figure out how can I take the character from my videos,
put it into the real world, and figure out
how do I turn them all into participants in the video?
And I feel like by me actually participating in that space,
while they’re watching those videos,
it takes it from one dimension to the next.
It’s like one of those things that I continue to ask myself:
"How am I extending the frame?"
I am what you call an extended frame video installation performance diva.
I’m chilling with my New Humans.
They my niggas from the South
They know what it’s about.
They about that like a JTS Jacolby Satterwhite life.
You know what, they know me from the back in the day
When I did paintings
But you don’t know what that’s like, ho,
you don’t know, you don’t know what that’s like.
Blog that shit.