Opening Reception
Sunday, March 9, 2014, 6-9pm
First Park, 33 East 1st Street, New York, NY 10003
[email protected]
NYC Parks, First Street Green, OHWOW and OSMOS are pleased to announce a special outdoor screening at First Park of Jacolby Satterwhite’s video works: Forest Nymphs (2009) and Reifying Desire 2 (2011), as well as portions selected from his latest piece, Reifying Desire 6 (2014). The videos will be on view nightly from 6 to 8 PM, March 9 through 15, along with a live performance on the opening night, Sunday, March 9, which will feature the artist as a fully fleshed avatar, enacting a movement piece that mimics his perpetual animations of the figure.
Satterwhite’s work often creates scenarios that move to decode the body. In the case of Forest Nymphs, the subjects interact in a natural arena, devoid of a contemporary context. Reifying Desire 2, staged in a similar wooded setting, teases the feral environment with complexly choreographed, computerized imagery, designing a space fully removed from familiar interpretation. Along with these two video pieces, Satterwhite presents clips taken from his newest work, Reifying Desire 6, currently on view at the 2014 Whitney Biennial; this latest iteration from his vigorous Reifying Desire series includes liveaction footage filmed in the LES. Combined here for the first time on one screen, Reifying Desire 6, along with Forest Nymphs and Reifying Desire 2, culminate at First Street Green as a specific homage to this site, and to New York, in general.
Using video, performance, 3D animation, drawing, and printmaking, Satterwhite explores themes of memory, desire, ritual, and heroism, as well as investigating process as a meta-narrative: the narrative between past, present, and future; and the narrative between media. By utilizing his body and artistic facility, his work serves as an extension/interpretation to examine history, insider/outsider art practices, and queer phenomenology – pushing the tensions created during translation to the viewer.
Jacolby Satterwhite (b. 1986, Columbia, SC) lives and works in New York, NY. He received a BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, and a MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. In 2013 he was a recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. His work has been included in exhibitions at several prestigious institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; New Museum, New York, NY; Bronx Museum, New York, NY; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY.
