Jacolby Satterwhite is one of the artists in ‘Queer Phantasy’, OHWOW Gallery LA, until August 15.
About Satterwhite
I use video, performance, 3D animation, fibers, drawing and printmaking to explore themes of memory, desire, personal and public mythology. My recent body work “The Matriarch’s Rhapsody” utilizes my mother’s drawings and music recordings as a primary resource. My has drawn thousands of schematic drawings/inventions influenced by consumer culture, medicine, fashion, surrealism, math, sex, astrology, philosophy, and matrilineal concerns. The drawings are mostly of common objects and luxury products found in the domestic sphere. The Matriarch’s Rhapsody’s title stems from the action of repurposing everyday objects drawn by my mother, and queering their meaning in a performative animated narrative. My practice has it’s roots in dada, surrealist, and fluxus attitudes. I pair down multiple drawings and create a time based narrative out of a nonsensical intersection of the text, rendered objects and dance performance. I am interested in process as a meta narrative; the narrative between a mother & and son’s studio practices, the narrative between past, present, and future, and the narrative between mediums. My body and art facility, as an extension/interpretation of my mother’s voice and drawings, is an attempt to examine memory, insider/ outsider art practices, contemporary surrealist practices, queer phenomenology and push the tensions created during translation and inheritance of studio practice.(text website artist)
see also: https://africanah.org/jacolby-satterwhite/
About ‘Queer Phantasy’:
OHWOW Gallery is pleased to present Queer Fantasy, a group exhibition curated by William J. Simmons. Featuring work by ten artists – A.K. Burns, Leidy Churchman, Jimmy DeSana, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Mariah Garnett, Jacolby Satterwhite, David Benjamin Sherry, Jack Smith, A.L. Steiner, and John Waters – this show seeks to recount and preserve a frequently marginalized history of queer voices within contemporary art.
The discourse surrounding Queer Art seems to center on generalities that assume a univocal motive exists, and that all queer artists intend to participate in forwarding this speculative agenda. Rather than exploring the idiosyncratic aesthetic of Queerness, the dominant ideological narrative suggests that this genre is solely concerned with behavior stereotypically attributed to a “queer lifestyle.”
In order to remedy these analytical shortcomings, this exhibition combines a group of artists from different generations and backgrounds working in a range of media. These artists illustrate the unique vision that Queerness offers, as a critical tool for the reformulation of normative art histories. There is always room for histories within histories, and the heterogeneity of Queer Fantasy points to diverse experiences and unexpected narratives. The artists in Queer Fantasy express themselves differently, yet what binds them is a common interest in interrogating existing histories with the beautifully disrupting power of queer representation. (text gallery)
