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Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self | "New York Close Up" | Art21

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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
    information around you
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    to generate your individuality.
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    Social media, technology, the Internet, the
    way that our bodies exist virtually--
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    it’s a paradigm shift for the multiplicity
    of the body.
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    My body is multiplied several times in my
    videos--
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    not because I’m narcissistic,
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    but it’s because I consider the videos to
    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
    marks.
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    ["Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self"]
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    Virtual space for me is a queer arena for
    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
    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
    that I see.
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    Voguing is all about performing objects around
    you that aren’t there.
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    The movement is so lyrical and it’s about
    drawing and accenting space.
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    Dancing and movement is the closest thing
    to drawing that I could figure out.
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    When I was growing up, the way that I started
    drawing was me trying to assist my mother
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    in becoming a rich woman on the Home Shopping
    Network.
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    [SUZANNE SOMERS] Well I say all the time,
    aging should be aspirational...
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    [SATTERWHITE] My mother was watching Suzanne
    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
    utilitarian objects.
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    She was sending them off to companies, trying
    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,
    but this is a couple thousand.
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    I started to realize that it wasn’t what
    I thought it was.
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    And she became more troubled and she started
    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
    mother's drawings.
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    The blurring of the authorship is super important
    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
    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
    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
    my mother’s drawings
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    To contain that mythology that I am trying
    to manifest through art.
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    I really want to make the most personal thing
    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
    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
    other narratively.
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    Kind of like "Exquisite Corpse" where you
    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
    faithful to.
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    It reveals things in my unconscious.
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    It gives me a creative restraint to create
    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
    understand limits.
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    It’s about me taking the avatar out of the
    video and putting him in the world.
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    How do I take that mundane urban environment
    and make it fantastical in my animation?
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    I just took a trash bag outside and turned
    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
    cause I was obsessed with family footage.
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    From the video, I notice I’m like constantly
    obsessed with hanging out with girls,
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    and my cousins, and they’re kind of like
    excluding me and pushing me out.
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    "No, Jacolby, you can’t! That’s what the
    girls do."
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    I felt like this desperation to be loved and
    to belong
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    is something I still, I think I still deal
    with today.
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    So it’s kind of like, how do I re-perform
    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
    I really explore the possibility of queerness.
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    So I said, "Okay, so I'm going to find twenty
    of my mother’s drawings"
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    "that deal with recreational American material
    culture."
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    "I’m going to find all of her drawings of
    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
    and combining them with my intentions.
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    It’s interesting that her drawings were
    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
    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
    to explore subconsciously in the work.
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    I know that my personal narrative is almost
    like a fantasy novel,
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    because it’s so loaded with these weird,
    esoteric things.
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    But at the same time, the narrative I’m
    most interested in
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    is what happens
    when drawing, performance, and animation intersect.
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    And I want to figure out how can I take the
    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
    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
    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
    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
    life.
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    You know what, they know me from the back
    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.
Title:
Jacolby Satterwhite Dances with His Self | "New York Close Up" | Art21
Description:

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Video Language:
English
Team:
Art21
Project:
"New York Close Up" series
Duration:
08:59

English subtitles

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