Jacolby Satterwhite draws on sources ranging from art history to voguing to his family’s home movies to craft intricate computer animated videos. “I think we’re in the age of the remix,” he has said. “Now it’s just about how you use the information around you to generate your individuality.” Satterwhite’s training in painting informs what he describes as the “DIY [do-it-yourself] aesthetic” of his videos.
For Country Ball 1989–2012, he recreated a 1989 home movie of a family cookout, mostly focused on him and his cousins dancing. Clips from the cookout populate the hallucinatory world, which features an ever-shifting landscape based on his tracings of drawings that his mother made of items such as food containers, cakes, a slide, and an imagined record player-boom box. Separately, he filmed himself dancing in 100 different takes, multiplied and altered the images—giving himself long locks of hair or sheathing his face and body in exuberant patterns—and inserted these personas into his animated landscape.
Additional text from What Is Contemporary Art? online course, Coursera, 2019
