Jacolby Satterwhite: Country Ball 1989—2012

Hawks Pavilion
Media Gallery H6

In Jacolby Satterwhite’s intricate digital videos, animation and found images come together to create self-contained worlds that are at once illusory and grounded in lived experience. For the dreamlike Country Ball 1989–2012, the artist deployed 3D graphics software to revisit a home movie from his childhood that documents a family cookout. Excerpted footage of the revelry floats through a vivid and constantly changing landscape alongside hand tracings the artist made of his late mother’s sketches. Patricia Satterwhite struggled with mental illness and turned to drawing as a form of therapy, producing thousands of illustrations relating to a wide range of topics, from medicine to astrology to consumer culture. The younger Satterwhite incorporates this imagery across his work, paying homage to the person whose encouragement and example inspired him to pursue art.

Country Ball 1989–2012 takes its title from the ballroom subculture that rose to prominence within LGBTQIA+ circles in the 1980s. Ballroom fuses fashion, music, performance, and activism toward personal expression and community building. In this video, Satterwhite performs vogue, a highly-stylized form of dance that is a signature of ballroom. To create his animated avatars, the artist filmed himself one hundred times in front of a green screen and then duplicated his likeness, altering his hair and obscuring his skin with colorful patterns. Casting himself as a chameleon, Satterwhite embraces the ballroom ethos that identity is fluid, performative, and open to interpretation.

Pictured: Jacolby Satterwhite (American, b. 1986), Country Ball 1989–2012, 2012, color video, 12 min. 38 sec. © Jacolby Satterwhite, Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York