MARVELOUS MOVIE MONDAYS!!
guest curator: Ben Coonley
theme for April: Self-Taught CG

The artist Jacolby Satterwhite recently Skyped with an auditorium of enrapt students in the Film and Electronic Arts Program at Bard College, where I teach. In his discussion, Satterwhite mentioned that his formal education was in painting. After completing graduate school, he decided to teach himself Maya (3D animation software) in order to bring to life a body of work he wanted to make based on drawings by his mother. As part of his unorthodox and highly labor-intensive production process, Satterwhite traces 2D illustrations on a Wacom tablet to create wirelike 3D forms, and composites live-action dance video into dense, dreamlike virtual worlds. He does all of the work himself (i.e. does not use assistants when he animates). The result of his enormous individual effort is some of the most personal, distinctive, and exuberant work being created in video or any other medium right now. I can’t think of another artist working today who is so good at combining 2D and 3D vocabularies, and who does such an uncanny job of merging real and imagined spaces.