Blessed Avenue (Jade Edition)
Jacolby Satterwhite is known for his powerful video installations combining dance, illustration, and 3D animation. With graphics inspired by the world of video games and using the expansive possibilities of virtual architecture, he creates alternative universes in which he transposes real-life and biographic elements as well as dancing bodies, including his own, to explore topics such as personal history, memory, fantasy, and desire. Blessed Avenue entails a series of works created by Satterwhite in homage to his mother in which he included some of the thousands of drawings she produced and sampled her voice compositions into the video’s soundtrack. The two-channel video notably stages a mesmerizing choreographic study into the dynamics of power in fetish sex and includes cameos by figures of club and queer scenes such as Juliana Huxtable, Lourdes Leon Ciccone, or DeSe Escobar. Inhabiting this fantastic but somehow dystopic virtual reality, the dancers, performing Vogueing-inspired choreographies, become like avatars of their other selves. They seem to navigate ambiguously between self-empowerment and alienation, raising questions about identity performance, freedom, and integrity in a digital and social media age.
This artwork is presented at Shedhalle as part of the exhibition CAMP FIRES curated by Simon W Marin and Violeta Mansilla which is taking place at Last Tango, Zurich and co-hosted by Shedhalle and Tanzhaus Zürich.
Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986 in Columbia, SC, lives in Brooklyn, NY) holds a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (2008) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania (2010). His work has been exhibited worldwide in venues such as Haus der Kunst, Munich (2021); Gwangju Biennial (2021); Art Basel Unlimited (2019); MoMA, New York (2019); The Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019); Berlin Biennale (2016); Whitney Biennial (2014). His first major institutional solo exhibition is currently on view at Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA.
