I consider the formalism of my dance strategies as a method for casting a spell of visual harmony. I have a strong grasp on my visual language and what I want to achieve with it. That’s what keeps the viewer locked into the mystery. I’m committed to the composition, to the performance of a ritual. — Jacolby Satterwhite
WE ARE IN HELL WHEN WE HURT EACH OTHER—a new exhibition by Satterwhite comprising mixed media and virtual installations, sculpture, photography, and neon works—is on view in Manhattan through Halloween.
Wolfgang Tillmans, Between Bridges, and several dozen international artists have joined together to sell posters to benefit art spaces, nightclubs, music venues, and bars at risk of closing for good because of the pandemic and subsequent lockdown.
Participating artists in the 2020 Solidarity project include Nicole Eisenman, Heji Shin, Carrie Mae Weems, Gillian Wearing, Betty Tompkins, Marlene Dumas, Christopher Wool, Jacolby Satterwhite, Isa Genzken, Rachel Harrison, Thomas Ruff, Elizabeth Peyton, Thao Nguyen Phan, Mark Leckey, Ralf Marsault, Heino Muller, Andreas Gursky, Spyros Rennt, Anne Imhof, Ebecho Muslimova, Piotr Nathan, Ming Wong, David Lindert, Heike-Karin Föll, Luc Tuymans, Stefan Fähler, Sabelo Mlangeni, Simon Denny, Melanie Bonajo, Karol Radziszewski, Karl Holmqvist, Özgür Kar, Claire Nicole Egan, Bobby Glew, Stewart Uoo, Felipe Baeza, Jochen Lempert, Seth Price, Tomma Abts, Wade Guyton, Peter Berlin, and David Wojnarowicz with Tom Warren.
As part of the Frieze Art and Fashion Summit in New York, Jacolby Satterwhite will join Studio Museum associate curator Legacy Russell for “Self and Subjectivity—Breaking the Confines of Identity,” a discussion about Satterwhite’s focus on “power, politics, and a dystopian future.”*
From top: Jacolby Satterwhite, photograph by Frank Sun, courtesy the artist, the photographer, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Jacolby Satterwhite, En Plein Air: Abduction I, 2014, courtesy of the artist and Morán Morán; Legacy Russell, photograph by Daniel Dorsa, courtesy of the writer and the photographer.
Jacolby Satterwhite, whose Reifying Desire 6 won rave reviews at this year’s Whitney Biennial, currently has his first Los Angeles show on view at OHWOW Gallery, featuring new two-dimensional works, sculptures, and videos. Satterwhite’s prints and films look like not-quite-old-school video games, with fantastical architectural islands floating in starry seas. Ground planes shift as if manipulated by a viewer’s joystick.
The works are otherworldly and at times aspirational, owing in part to the exhibition title rendered on a gallery wall in purple neon. In several Satterwhite wears a bodysuit in which he often performs, with a glowing smartphone screen placed over his crotch strapped in a full-body cone-breasted harness, and flanked by naked men. In a single-channel film, the artist appears in the same bodysuit engaged in yogic sexual positions, as bodies multiply like fruit in a vast Bodhi tree that stretches its branches to the heavens while babies crawl over its twisted roots.
From the exhibition statement:
Often using his mother’s drawings as a resource (she created thousands of schematics and inventions centered on consumer culture, medicine, sex, astrology, and philosophy), Satterwhite propagates her two-dimensional gestures and contextualizes the related themes. For this exhibition, the artist was inspired by a specific sketch, a sort of self-portrait he discovered among her collection of works, in which she drew seven vessels or architectural structures beneath the handwritten phrase “How lovly is me being as I am.” Satterwhite expanded from this personal reflection, developing a macrocosmos, in response.
While his latest work connects to reality, the visual dialogue also reads something like an extraterrestrial journal, a poetic scape where there is no sense of physical place and no parameters of time. His methods are radical, and the imagery surreal, yet he maintains a visual course of formalist aesthetics and composition. Through performance, video, 3D animation, installation, and sculpture, Satterwhite explores themes of memory, desire, and ritual. He is interested in process as a metanarrative: the narrative between past, present, and future, and how that process relates a broad, shared experience.
Satterwhite’s exhibition serves as a re-exploration of histories, a compound of various art practices, and a queer rendition of phenomenology. He examines and reifies the tension created between intent and interpretation. If minimalist works move to negate their author, the maximum use of visual language in How Lovely Is Me Being As I Am reaches to the other end of the spectrum, beyond the author, presenting a universal expression.
How Lovely Is Being Me As I Am will be on view until December 20.
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