Jacolby Satterwhite How Lovely Is Me Being As I Am

Jacolby Satterwhite’s exhibition, titled How Lovely Is Me Being As I Am, presents a narrative series of two-dimensional images, alongside sculpture and video. Satterwhite’s psyche serves as the main conduit for constructing his message; his revisions of media, both with new forms and traditional modes, edify the definition of medium.

Often using his mother’s drawings as a resource (she created thousands of schematics and inventions centered on consumer culture, medicine, sex, astrology, and philosophy), Satterwhite propagates these two-dimensional gestures and contextualizes the related themes. For this exhibition, the artist was inspired by a specific sketch, a sort of self-portrait he discovered among her collection of works, in which she drew seven vessels or architectural structures beneath the handwritten phrase “How lovly is me being as I am.” Satterwhite expanded from this personal reflection, developing a macrocosmos, in response.

While his latest work connects to reality, the visual dialogue also reads something like an extraterrestrial journal, a poetic-scape where there is no sense of physical place and no parameters of time. His methods are radical, and the imagery surreal, yet he maintains a visual course of formalist aesthetics and composition. Through performance, video, 3D animation, installation, and sculpture, Satterwhite explores themes of memory, desire, and ritual. He is interested in process as a metanarrative: the narrative between past, present, and future, and how that process relates a broad, shared experience.

Satterwhite’s exhibition serves as a re-exploration of histories, a compound of various art practices, and a queer rendition of phenomenology. He examines and reifies the tension created between intent and interpretation. If minimalist works move to negate their author, the maximum use of visual language in How Lovely Is Me Being As I Am reaches to the other end of the spectrum, beyond the author, presenting a universal expression.