WEBVTT 00:00:09.720 --> 00:00:11.000 [Jacolby Satterwhite, Artist] 00:00:11.000 --> 00:00:13.540 So that's what I do when you guys aren't around. 00:00:18.140 --> 00:00:20.060 I think we're in the age of the remix. 00:00:20.060 --> 00:00:22.860 There’s no such thing as originality anymore. 00:00:22.860 --> 00:00:26.780 And now it’s just about how you use the information around you 00:00:26.780 --> 00:00:29.040 to generate your individuality. 00:00:29.980 --> 00:00:36.840 Social media, technology, the Internet, the way that our bodies exist virtually-- 00:00:38.060 --> 00:00:42.700 it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity of the body. 00:00:46.390 --> 00:00:49.249 My body is multiplied several times in my videos-- 00:00:49.249 --> 00:00:51.170 not because I’m narcissistic, 00:00:51.170 --> 00:00:55.740 but it’s because I consider the videos to be similar to an essay. 00:00:56.500 --> 00:00:58.380 I feel like my body is a form of punctuation. 00:00:58.380 --> 00:01:01.720 They act as commas, exclamation points, question marks. 00:01:03.600 --> 00:01:07.060 ["Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self"] 00:01:07.070 --> 00:01:11.049 Virtual space for me is a queer arena for my body to perform in. 00:01:11.049 --> 00:01:14.870 Voguing is all about performing realness. 00:01:14.870 --> 00:01:20.070 I feel like there is a perfect parallel between my practice and the ball scene. 00:01:24.510 --> 00:01:26.690 When I perform in the green screen, 00:01:26.690 --> 00:01:31.430 it's usually freestyle but based on the objects that I see. 00:01:34.290 --> 00:01:38.130 Voguing is all about performing objects around you that aren’t there. 00:01:38.130 --> 00:01:42.520 The movement is so lyrical and it’s about drawing and accenting space. 00:01:42.520 --> 00:01:46.680 Dancing and movement is the closest thing to drawing that I could figure out. 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 00:01:54.390 --> 00:01:57.840 in becoming a rich woman on the Home Shopping Network. 00:01:57.840 --> 00:02:01.910 [SUZANNE SOMERS] Well I say all the time, aging should be aspirational... 00:02:01.910 --> 00:02:06.159 [SATTERWHITE] My mother was watching Suzanne Somers telling Americans they can be an entrepreneur 00:02:06.159 --> 00:02:08.340 and make a million dollars. 00:02:08.340 --> 00:02:13.450 And so she started to make drawings of regular utilitarian objects. 00:02:13.450 --> 00:02:17.890 She was sending them off to companies, trying to get them invented. 00:02:17.890 --> 00:02:19.790 Find one my favorites in this batch. 00:02:19.790 --> 00:02:24.190 She’s made way more drawings than this, but this is a couple thousand. 00:02:24.190 --> 00:02:26.890 I started to realize that it wasn’t what I thought it was. 00:02:26.900 --> 00:02:36.920 And she became more troubled and she started to evolve into having a mental illness. 00:02:38.250 --> 00:02:42.330 The drawings became more of a necessary meditation. 00:02:42.330 --> 00:02:43.810 Keeping the chaos out of her head. 00:02:43.810 --> 00:02:48.140 Keeping her mind contained and focused. 00:02:52.740 --> 00:02:56.700 "The Matriarch’s Rhapsody" is based on my mother's drawings. 00:02:58.640 --> 00:03:01.740 The blurring of the authorship is super important for me. 00:03:05.510 --> 00:03:06.930 I work with her drawings because 00:03:06.930 --> 00:03:09.840 I want to make my work from a pure place that comes from necessity 00:03:09.840 --> 00:03:16.530 and comes from obsession and comes from the essential, barebones, necessary place that 00:03:16.530 --> 00:03:17.690 art should come from. 00:03:19.450 --> 00:03:20.599 Stuff that I grew up dealing with. 00:03:20.599 --> 00:03:23.520 It’s like J.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis books. 00:03:23.520 --> 00:03:26.520 "Final Fantasy" one through ten, and all the video games I played. 00:03:26.520 --> 00:03:30.290 There was always a strategy guide. A legend. 00:03:30.290 --> 00:03:34.930 I wanted to create my own codex of 250 of my mother’s drawings 00:03:34.930 --> 00:03:39.730 To contain that mythology that I am trying to manifest through art. 00:03:39.730 --> 00:03:44.870 I really want to make the most personal thing in my life my work. 00:03:44.870 --> 00:03:47.410 When I was a kid, I got diagnosed with cancer 00:03:47.410 --> 00:03:49.770 and I had to go through chemo for two years. 00:03:49.770 --> 00:03:52.410 And I lost my movement in my arm. 00:03:52.410 --> 00:03:54.670 So my body got disrupted. 00:03:56.140 --> 00:04:01.660 "Reifying Desire 3," I picked medical drawings that fix or heal the body, 00:04:01.660 --> 00:04:05.020 or enhance the performance of the body. 00:04:05.020 --> 00:04:09.930 And I gave myself two minutes to write a stream-of-conscious essay 00:04:09.930 --> 00:04:14.790 of how these drawings would blend with each other narratively. 00:04:14.790 --> 00:04:19.299 Kind of like "Exquisite Corpse" where you take different elements and you make into 00:04:19.299 --> 00:04:22.049 a uniform idea. 00:04:22.049 --> 00:04:24.590 Everyone has a system that they have to stay faithful to. 00:04:24.590 --> 00:04:26.540 It reveals things in my unconscious. 00:04:26.540 --> 00:04:29.860 It gives me a creative restraint to create a nonsensical storyline-- 00:04:29.860 --> 00:04:33.200 this unlimited sci-fi surrealist paradise. 00:04:40.000 --> 00:04:43.660 Another system is performing outdoors in public. 00:05:05.420 --> 00:05:08.100 The body that I'm performing as doesn’t understand limits. 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. 00:05:16.620 --> 00:05:21.720 How do I take that mundane urban environment and make it fantastical in my animation? 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. 00:05:30.020 --> 00:05:33.260 When I go out, it’s like a sketchbook. 00:05:35.830 --> 00:05:38.139 I don’t know what’s gonna happen, 00:05:38.140 --> 00:05:40.760 But I know that when I get back with the footage, 00:05:40.760 --> 00:05:45.860 it’s going to inspire something that happens in my animation. 00:05:51.720 --> 00:05:56.900 Learning 3D animation really, really started cause I was obsessed with family footage. 00:05:59.940 --> 00:06:03.920 From the video, I notice I’m like constantly obsessed with hanging out with girls, 00:06:04.910 --> 00:06:08.560 and my cousins, and they’re kind of like excluding me and pushing me out. 00:06:08.560 --> 00:06:11.620 "No, Jacolby, you can’t! That’s what the girls do." 00:06:11.620 --> 00:06:16.160 I felt like this desperation to be loved and to belong 00:06:16.160 --> 00:06:18.580 is something I still, I think I still deal with today. 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? 00:06:23.400 --> 00:06:25.060 It’s like a reconstruction. 00:06:28.500 --> 00:06:33.620 In my "Country Ball" world, that’s where I really explore the possibility of queerness. 00:06:35.520 --> 00:06:40.500 So I said, "Okay, so I'm going to find twenty of my mother’s drawings" 00:06:40.500 --> 00:06:43.520 "that deal with recreational American material culture." 00:06:43.520 --> 00:06:51.940 "I’m going to find all of her drawings of grills, slides, sinks, carousels, TV, cakes." 00:06:51.940 --> 00:06:53.340 Lots of cakes. 00:06:55.660 --> 00:07:01.020 I’m removing her intentions of the drawings and combining them with my intentions. 00:07:02.660 --> 00:07:06.740 It’s interesting that her drawings were trying to subscribe to 00:07:06.740 --> 00:07:08.500 the most normal thing you can be. 00:07:08.500 --> 00:07:11.540 And when they enter my universes, they become something else. 00:07:11.540 --> 00:07:13.340 They become queered. 00:07:13.340 --> 00:07:16.800 It’s queering the purpose of the object. 00:07:16.800 --> 00:07:20.060 A cake becomes a skyscraper. 00:07:21.080 --> 00:07:23.840 Women into hermaphrodites. 00:07:31.500 --> 00:07:35.800 Torture, gestation, transformation, world-building. 00:07:35.800 --> 00:07:40.350 They’re all recurring themes that I love to explore subconsciously in the work. 00:07:40.350 --> 00:07:45.460 I know that my personal narrative is almost like a fantasy novel, 00:07:45.460 --> 00:07:49.240 because it’s so loaded with these weird, esoteric things. 00:07:49.240 --> 00:07:52.540 But at the same time, the narrative I’m most interested in 00:07:52.550 --> 00:07:57.390 is what happens when drawing, performance, and animation intersect. 00:08:01.800 --> 00:08:06.840 And I want to figure out how can I take the character from my videos, 00:08:06.850 --> 00:08:09.670 put it into the real world, and figure out 00:08:09.670 --> 00:08:11.740 how do I turn them all into participants in the video? 00:08:11.740 --> 00:08:14.600 And I feel like by me actually participating in that space, 00:08:14.600 --> 00:08:16.100 while they’re watching those videos, 00:08:16.110 --> 00:08:18.710 it takes it from one dimension to the next. 00:08:20.040 --> 00:08:23.720 It’s like one of those things that I continue to ask myself: 00:08:24.320 --> 00:08:26.869 "How am I extending the frame?" 00:08:30.389 --> 00:08:34.949 I am what you call an extended frame video installation performance diva. 00:08:37.520 --> 00:08:39.700 I’m chilling with my New Humans. 00:08:39.700 --> 00:08:41.740 They my niggas from the South 00:08:41.740 --> 00:08:43.940 They know what it’s about. 00:08:43.950 --> 00:08:47.080 They about that like a JTS Jacolby Satterwhite life. 00:08:48.660 --> 00:08:50.620 You know what, they know me from the back in the day 00:08:50.620 --> 00:08:52.900 When I did paintings 00:08:52.900 --> 00:08:54.900 But you don’t know what that’s like, ho, 00:08:54.900 --> 00:08:57.320 you don’t know, you don’t know what that’s like. 00:08:57.320 --> 00:08:58.111 Blog that shit.