Satterwhite himself speaks openly about his conscious utilization of certain aesthetic properties within his video animation work. How are we meant to engage with such a multi-faceted exhibit, one that takes a maximalist visual approach to media and cultural references? “You’re at home” employs non-differentiating digital aestheticization and fetishization to a mishmash of heavy sociopolitical references- race, sexuality, queerness, environmental anxiety, mental health, decolonization, ancestry, utopia/dystopia, and the abandonment of the material world. The traditional gesture is then digitally transcribed, the drawings processed and reprocessed many times over to achieve a holistic and totalizing body of work. Take, for example, the familiar white-cube gallery inside Pioneer Works showcasing his mother’s drawings and lyrics on framed sheets of A4 paper. Satterwhite’s work traverses numerous forms of both “old” and “new” media. The show is overwhelming and confrontational. The album functions as the nightclub-esque soundtrack to Birds in Paradise, while Patricia’s drawings-compositions of thin lines in lattice-like geometric arrangements-are rendered digitally and inserted into the videos and 3-D printed into sculptures that populate the exhibit. Satterwhite took her recordings and produced a double LP electronic album, Love Will Find a Way Home, released alongside the exhibition. Satterwhite’s mother Patricia, who suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life, retreated into a private creative practice leaving behind numerous a cappella recordings of songs she wrote on cassette tapes and hundreds of drawings of commonplace material objects. The personal flourishes that embellish “You’re at home” also include an audio LP.
These scenes are collaged next to real-life footage of forest fires, glacial melt, and other imagery alluding to impending climate cataclysm, as well as footage of performance pieces emulating Yorùbá rituals in which a digital avatar of the artist is hung upside-down, twisted in and whipped with cloths, or baptized in a river by a Nigerian mermaid. Bionic creatures soar amidst leather-clad performers and muses, their machine-like movements inspired by what Pioneer Works identifies as “voguing and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s pared down, repetitive gestures, reflecting a kind of banal labor performed by citizens of a theoretical society with no social classes”. “You’re at home” is an immersive environment revolving around Satterwhite’s latest video opus, Birds in Paradise, a digital tapestry of “mythological, queer universes derived from American consumerism, pop culture, African folklore, ritual, and personal narra-tives.” Green-screened clones of Satterwhite himself permeate these hypnotic and fantastic environments, dancing alongside multitudes of computer-generated imagery (CGI) avatars that occupy the morphing architecture of futuristic edifices. In particular, his show at Pioneer Works exemplifies a technological audiovisual overload-a cacophony of animated videos on a myriad of screens, installation works, a virtual reality album, and live performances-emblematic of our contemporary media-saturated existence. In recent years, interdisciplinary artist Jacolby Satterwhite has become a superstar proponent of this investigation, culminating in two exhibitions: “Room for Living” at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia in 2019, and “You’re at home” at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn in 2018. As with any contemporary and ongoing development, it is difficult to fully assess its impact and implications without the benefit of hindsight, but seeing as society has already been introduced to a piercing self-awareness of our digital citizenship and dependency on technology, new media art has proven itself to be a highly viable lens for further reflection upon and analysis of our digital age.
The engagement of art with technology is at the frontier of contemporary art, cropping up at every gallery and biennial: the introduction of a new technology assumes its immediate and inevitable appropriation and reappropriation for artistic purposes. Since the time of the Y2K bug, new media has exponentially and effectively saturated both our everyday life and the art world that embellishes it. Originally published in the 2020 print edition
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