Part of SFFILM Festival
An Evening with Jacolby Satterwhite: “Birds in Paradise”
Description
Join us for an in-depth conversation with Jacolby Satterwhite, a recent Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts, and a presentation of his two-channel epic Birds in Paradise (Jacolby Satterwhite, USA 2016, 63 min), a hybrid of 3D animated queer utopian dystopias and live-action cyber drag. Evoking an array of creative influences including Fluxus, Surrealist filmmakers, choreographer Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, voguing, Hieronymous Bosch, the video game Final Fantasy, and Daft Punk. Featuring a soundtrack with his mother Patricia’s a capella recordings remixed into syrupy thick dance beats, Satterwhite’s video brims with pleasurable contradictions and brutal indictments of our age of ever-impending apocalypse.
Presented in collaboration with Headlands Center for the Arts.
Multimedia artist Jacolby Satterwhite credits his mom for much of where he is today. “She’ll always be the gesso to my canvas,” he told Out magazine. Satterwhite’s drawings reside in various permanent collections, including the Whitney, MoMA, and the Studio Museum of Harlem. Having moved away from painting, he’s been focusing on integrating music and video with performance at venues around the world. His defiant representation of queerness and otherness is supported by an interest in safe spaces, citing the Afrofuturist movement as a source of inspiration. “Because it has been raked into my subconscious since I was a teenager,” Satterwhite says, “I think that no matter what I do I’m aware of metonymy and the codes associated with bodies, genders, races, mental illness, outsider, insider—I’m aware of what queerness really is. Queerness for race, queerness for everything. I feel like that’s the ultimate overarching basis of where my work operates and functions.”
