Jacolby Satterwhite, We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other, 2020. Virtual reality color video with sound. RT: 24:00 min.
The Otherworldly Jacolby Satterwhite
The evolution of Jacolby Satterwhite’s career path is uncommon, though there is a certain logic to it. He had years of formal education as a painter, from boarding school to graduate school, when the traditions of performance art and the body art of the ’60s and ’70s, as well as contemporary digital tools, began to permeate his practice. Also underpinning his work was an attraction to the universe of Final Fantasy and other alternative worlds, a fascination born from his childhood years recovering from a very real battle with cancer.
Satterwhite turns to art history to find the most powerful expressions of recurring themes, including survival, labor, ritual, allegory, and resurrection. His ongoing explorations of Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, or Manet’s The Luncheon on the Grass—works that articulate a fundamentally human sense of the boundaries between reality and surreality, between faith and skepticism, and between conformity and iconoclasm—feed his continuous reinvention of performance or performative body-based work, as the basis for densely layered simulations of reality or full-on alternative universes.
With influences ranging from Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons to Final Fantasy, Bosch, and beyond, Satterwhite builds worlds that have their own immersive landscapes, avatars, characters, and taxonomies. For more than a decade he has invited us to explore these worlds through a variety of mediums, from the tools of 3-D animation and virtual reality to sculpture, photography, neon, and installation. His latest addition to this body of work will be on view in a new show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in New York beginning September 24.
Earlier this month the artist spoke with Superblue Senior Curator Kathleen Forde to discuss his work, its evolution, and artmaking in our current social and political reality.
Jacolby Satterwhite, We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other, 2020. Virtual reality color video with sound. RT: 24:00 min.
"I think all art experience is a collaboration between the artist and the viewer. I mean, there is an exchange. I can only meet you halfway and you have to interpret it."
Can you share a little of what we can expect in your upcoming show at Mitchell-Innes & Nash?
I’ve been working on the film that is the centerpiece of the show every day since October of last year. Time is always a challenge, as I take all of the plans, scenes, and tableaus that I create to really ambitious extremes and most of the pipeline is done by myself.
I’m very ritualistic and sacred about keeping the production process open-ended until my shows open. There are so many variables that are delicate, very specific nuances like colors, editing, and juxtaposition that continually reveal themselves and change until the very last moments of creating the work. During the final layer of editing the film all together in Premiere, that’s when a lot of surprises come through in the narrative for me visually. So, I don’t like to lock it in before then.
The title of the show is We Are in Hell When We Hurt Each Other. It’s hard not to read that through the lens of our current sociopolitical environment, but knowing your inclination towards the ironic and aversion to telling people what to think, I assume the title is not so straightforward?
Right, I don’t ever like to make a big statement like that. I’m not that kind of artist, but I do like to play between those lines. I like to clash the heavy-handed with the lighthearted. In a sense, I’m being irreverent by using such a strong title, considering the work that is being generated for the show expresses more of a resilience and a joy. I guess you could say I’m kind of mischievous when it comes to how I conceptually build things. The spirit of the work juxtaposed with a macabre title is really more of a paradox.
I recall you saying you’re waiting for the next wave of rudeness.
Everything is so uptight right now and you can’t help but work feeling like someone’s watching you over your shoulder. And it’s not supportive of a good creative environment for a community of artists, who intend to always push the lines. I don’t think it feels really generous to ask an artist to tread lightly on a tightrope when they’re creating. I just look forward to a world where we can have more complex conversations.
Having said that, I work from observation and I can’t avoid seeing what I’m seeing every day in the news and outside of my apartment in Brooklyn. Right now, if I were in a simulation, it feels parallel to the survival genre in gaming, like walking across a screen and avoiding the little red fireballs. If I’m thinking about an observational pain area conceptually, that is how I interpret the spatial organization of our current time.
That’s why it felt appropriate to source that title, We Are All in Hell When We Hurt Each Other. The title is a quotation from my mother. It’s from a song she wrote that I produced on the album that I released for my Pioneer Works show last year. It’s the title of the show, the film, and some of the neon light sculptures in the exhibition.
Jacolby Satterwhite, We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other, 2020. Virtual reality color video with sound. RT: 24:00 min.
"I’m so interested in installation, sculpture, painting, sound, and how to bring it together to make an immersive experience. I’ve developed my lexicon and now I’m ready to really kind of play jazz with it.”
Your mom, Patricia, has had such a presence in this body of work as a collaborator. She herself was an artist who found art making as a respite from her own struggles with illness. Is she also present in the show beyond the reference in the title?
Yes. The songs that I made are from the album that has her voice from the cassette tapes that she recorded when I was a kid. It just felt natural because I’ve been creating work since I was a kid and I was making work with her, making drawings with her, and she would make those recordings when I was around. She’s not with us anymore, but I still have that archive with me. And it represents a lot of what created my own personal syntax and language.
Collaboration permeates your practice. Overtly with the artists, performers, and other creatives you work with, but also with your audience, right? You invite visitors to sit in, navigate, and experience an alternate world or worlds created by you . . . your lexicon, imagined landscapes, bodies, imagination, fears, hopes, or memories.
I think all art experience is a collaboration between the artist and the viewer. I mean, there is an exchange. I can only meet you halfway and you have to interpret it. I’m not going to try to lock a viewer down to see my piece. My method of creating is so crystallized no one would ever know what my true intentions are. So, it is definitely a collaboration between and with the people who choose to live in my worlds and be present in those installations.
That core tenet of collaboration is associated with empathy to me, which we sure could use more of in this world. It’s an act of placing oneself in another’s position or, as you say, meeting them halfway, a dialogue. In addition to an audience who has yet to engage with these works, who are you collaborating with in your new film?
I’m using footage of myself that I performed on the green screen and also data that I motion-captured at the University of Pennsylvania. I also shot Bethann Hardison, the model and activist who’s done a lot to create a diverse space in the modeling world. I think she’s a phenomenal legend and I am very honored to have been able to shoot her at her house in upstate New York and have her kind of play one of the important motifs and character in the film. That’s more of like a presentation of utopia. And also Dev Hynes, known as Blood Orange. I shot him earlier this winter. He has a small part in the film too. I wanted to choose two iconic Black figures I respect and love, for what they’ve contributed to culture and what they represent. I felt like what they represented really entangles well with what I’m trying to give off with the piece and how I think it reflects with what’s going on now.
Jacolby Satterwhite, We Are In Hell When We Hurt Each Other, 2020. Virtual reality color video with sound. RT: 24:00 min.
This show will be the culmination of a body of work, with a particular conceptual and aesthetic relationship, that you have been developing for a decade and rolling out in shows from 2016 onwards at SFMoMA, Gavin Brown, and Pioneer Works prior to the Mitchell-Innes & Nash show. Can you imagine a fantasy scenario where all of the work would live together in one immersive architecture of film, sculptures, VR, music, and performance?
I would love to evolve how it’s exhibited over the next few years. That’s what makes me super excited about Superblue, to have an opportunity to really push everything I’ve been building in this decade-long body of work. I would like to focus on more ambitious isolated gestures derived from the physical universe as I’ve been constructing it. I want to do more interactive art and gaming, holograms and augmented reality experiences, related to some of the motifs around the films or paintings or sculptures. In a way I’m trying to figure out how do I keep this world contained. Because I’m so interested in installation, sculpture, painting, sound, and how to bring it together to make an immersive experience.
I’ve developed my lexicon and now I’m ready to really kind of play jazz with it.
