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The Arts Intel Report

Jacolby Satterwhite: Room for Living

Sept 13, 2019 – Jan 19, 2020
1214 Arch St, Philadelphia, PA 19107, United States

Battling bone cancer as a boy in South Carolina, Jacolby Satterwhite played a lot of video games in the hospital. Battling schizophrenia, his mother obsessively drew strange shapes in an attempt to invent money-making products. Chaos, control, and creativity are all bound together in the work of Satterwhite, now 33, who says, “Everyone has a system that they have to stay faithful to.” Satterwhite’s immersive video installations defy space, time, and gravity in an Avatar-evocative format. With their neon color palette, they suggest a video-game world, but one made up of Satterwhite’s personal memories, historical archives, and his mother’s drawings. In Room for Living, the artist brings his world off the screen into a 3-D spectacle, or as he might say, “an unlimited sci-fi surrealist paradise.” —E.C.