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

[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.