Jacolby Satterwhite performing at SFMOMA in 2016.
CONCEPTUAL ARTIST Jacolby Satterwhite has joined Mitchell-Innes & Nash. Satterwhite works in 3-D animation and performance. Trained as a painter, he has mastered new technology and the use of his body as a vessel for expression. He innovative practice harnesses these seemingly disparate assets to address key themes including labor, consumption, queer identity, agency, and fantasy.
“Jacolby is a critical addition to our program,” gallery co-founder Lucy Mitchell-Innes said in a statement. “I was first introduced to the work at the Studio Museum in 2012 and was drawn to the rigorous and subversive nature of his practice, both aesthetically and conceptually. His complex and deliberate body of work considering agency, sexuality, production and technology, is closely aligned to other artists we work with, including General Idea, Pope.L, Monica Bonvicini and GCC. He’s proven to be an influential voice amongst his contemporaries.”
“I was first introduced to the work at the Studio Museum in 2012 and was drawn to the rigorous and subversive nature of his practice, both aesthetically and conceptually.” — Lucy Mitchell-Innes
Here is how the gallery describes the artist’s work:
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Satterwhite uses a range of software to produce intricately detailed animations and live action film of real and imagined worlds populated by the avatars of artists and friends. These animations serve as the stage on which the artist synthesizes the multiple disciplines that encompass his practice, namely illustration, performance, painting, sculpture, photography and writing. Satterwhite draws from an extensive set of references, guided by queer theory, modernism and video game history to challenge conventions of Western art through a personal and political lens.
JACOLBY SATTERWHITE, “Avenue B,” 2018 (still image of 3D animation and video). | via Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Satterwhite’s a new video, “Avenue B,” premieres in the summer film series at Mitchell-Innes & Nash from July 20-24, and he will present his first solo exhibition with the gallery in fall 2019.
Last month, Satterwhite presented an installation version of “Avenue B” at Morán Morán gallery in the Statements sector of the Art Basel art fair. The imaginative work featured virtual reality, 3-D printed sculptures, drawing and wallpaper. “It emulates a domestic setting, which is the genesis of my work,” the artist said, describing the work. “My mother worked on the blueprints of idealistic homes and the objects contained in them. And as my practice is animism-orientated philosophically, I wanted to continue to use the aesthetic of the home, and the materials it contains, but more specifically, to consider the notion of the home-entertainment center—to create a universe centralized around these ideas.”
His late mother, Patricia Satterwhite, also inspired “En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance,” a performance at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Satterwhite re-invented her archive of 12 a cappella albums recorded in the late 1990s on ordinary cassette tapes. In collaboration with Nick Weiss (Teengirl Fantasy), he created a visual album that mixed her original vocals and melodies with electronic house and club music. The commission resulted in an “immersive virtual reality dreamscape” cum listening party and live concert performed in 2016 (in progress) and 2017.
BORN IN COLUMBUS, S.C., Satterwhite lives and works in Brooklyn, N.Y. He earned a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, and holds an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Earlier this year, his solo exhibition “Blessed Avenue” was on view at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in Harlem. He participated in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, has been featured on Art21, and presented “Grey Lines: Jacolby Satterwhite” at Recess, the New York public art space.
“I’m incredibly thrilled to expand my oeuvre into its full form with such a major program as Mitchell-Innes & Nash,” said Satterwhite. “I look forward to being in dialogue with the other artist on the roster who have strong foundations in modernist abstraction and performance practice and a team that can help sustain these practices.” CT
TOP IMAGE: Performance preview of Jacolby Satterwhite’s “En Plein Air: Music of Objective Romance,” 2016 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. | Photo by Beth LaBerge, SFMOMA
READ MORE about Jacolby Satterwhite on his website
BOOKSHELF
“When the Stars Begin to Fall: Imagination and the American South” documents the exhibition organized by the Studio Museum in Harlem, which featured the work of both Jacolby Satterwhite and Patricia Satterwhite. “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” traces the emergence performance art of over the past 50 years through the practices of African American artists including Jacolby Satterwhite, Terry Adkins, David Hammons, Adrian Piper, Senga Nengudi, Adam Pendleton, and Pope.L.
Coinciding with his appearance in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Jacolby Satterwhite explains to Charlie Rose what brought him to art and how he found the focus of his practice. “After I got devastated with Western painting’s ideaologies and felt like my own personal mythology was more interesting than that, I wanted to figure out a way to take [my mother’s] archive, my personal archives from my family footage, photographs, and her drawings, and use it as very private art-making tools. That’s when I began using my body. Because the body was the central subject that had nothing to do with the public, which is art history and the institution. It was a way for me to find a kind of agency as a creator,” the artist said. “I found a way to re-articular the painting language I was trying to get as a painter for 15 years through 3-D animation and my body.” | Video posted by Jacolby Satterwhite
New York Close Up: Jacolby Satterwhite Is Going Public | Video by ART21
