Jacolby Satterwhite, Fertilizer, 2016, animated GIF drawn from 2012 film “Reifying Desire 3”.
I’ve always been fascinated with the ways in which a GIF from a larger digital video work can loop ad infinitum beats deserving to be isolated. Take for instance, the seven GIFs taken from Jacolby Satterwhite’s Reifying Desire project, which are included in our current curatorial project, Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies.
The six-part series of surreal 3D animations is a collaboration between the artist and his mother, where her drawings and texts for proposed home shopping network self-care products are rendered in his fantastical utopian spaces. These worlds are so dense and detailed, and at a recent screening I saw of Reifying Desire 5 as part of a Black Radical Imagination shorts programme at this week’s Images Festival in Toronto, very blink-and-you-missed-it. Was it so bad that I wanted to stay longer in the “Pussy Power” world of winding mid-air braid extensions, or replay the penis-as-MAC-esque-lipstick jizzing out smaller versions Satterwhite himself vogueing?
Jacolby Satterwhite, Ponytail and Jewels, 2016, animated GIF drawn from 2012 film “Reifying Desire 4”.
Satterwhite’s green screen vogueing is a consistent trope carried throughout the series, like a videogame avatar levelling up through histories, cultures and representations. Another, shimmering globs of viscous liquid, frequently alluded as a life-giving force in the series, is vomited (see at the top, in the 2016 work, Fertilizer from the 2012 film Reifying Desire 3) or sprayed out of breasts.
The latter, Forest Nympheaux (2016), comes from the 2011 film Reifying Desire 2, is a slaying of breastfeeding between two zentai-dressed baby mamas on a fallen trunk in an artificial forest. In our curatorial for Geographically Indeterminate Fantasies, we talked about the anxieties projected into these constructed worlds by their maker. Freezing on this moment — as well as one where an orgy takes place high above tree branches floating in a space-like abyss — suggest the play and competition that derive from the generative potentialities of our bodies. Even in utopia, the pressure to slay can overrule.
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