M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:19:19.

Collection: Lundgren Gallery.

Satterwhite was born in Columbia, South Carolina in 1986. As a child, he would watch Janet Jackson’s video anthology VHS tape every day after school. Music videos by Deee-Lite, Björk, Janet, Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Michael Jackson and Madonna also influenced his aesthetic. He began working with technology at the age of 11 when he got his first personal computer.

Jacolby Satterwhite uses performance, to examine memory, inside and outsider art practices, contemporary surrealism, queer phenomenology and push the tensions created during translation and inheritance of studio practice. Blessed Avenue, Jacolby Satterwhite’s psychedelic quest into queer desire and memory, is a heady plunge into an otherworldly realm where computer aesthetics merge with an array of bodily postures from bondage routines to nocturnal choreographies. We watch Satterwhite and his friends act out the power dynamics embedded in S&M with the physical vigor of ballroom dancing. The backdrop to the party is a digital universe Satterwhite illustrated based on sketches made by his late mother Patricia − a self-made artist who found solace in art as a respite from schizophrenia - created over the years with the hope of selling them on QVC. His mother’s semi-abstract drawings (10,000 in their entirety) accentuate the dreamscape with subliminal motifs, bordering reason with intuition, as well as the past with the present. The soundtrack surrounding the darkened gallery is a remix of a capella songs his mother recorded onto cassette tapes in-house with limited means (Blessed Avenue is the namesake of one of these songs). A collaboration with Nick Weiss from the electronic music duo Teengirl Fantasy transforms the tapes’ husky sound into rivetingly melancholic melodies, complimenting the film’s opulent rhythm and carnal atmosphere. The artist’s meditation on his bygone mother’s legacy infuses benevolence and longing into a universe poised between a sassy ’90s house music video and a purgatory scene à la Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights.

Satterwhite’s mise-en-scène encapsulates a corporal transience in the form of carnal experimentations and power exchanges, balancing the deviance of a sex club with the staid politics of main- stream society. This hallucinatory universe is equally familiar and peculiar. It is at once illusory and dystopian, bestial and affable. In this sense the film portrays on a monumental scale the paradox of the millennial condition, one whose boundaries shift effortlessly between the cyber and the physical, infusing fleshliness into the machine, blending queer desire into the droid. Ultimately, what makes Blessed Avenue such an important piece is its very reanimation of the earnest defiance, which brought forth the word queer in the first place.

http://jacolby.com/