"I was thinking about how to expand the archive that influences my animations and I tried to move past some of the conceptual precedents that built my earlier work." (Satterwhite in Mitchell-innes & Nash)

 

Visiting a community in Cleveland, Satterwhite asked students, teachers, key workers and unhoused people to draw their response to a single question: What does utopia look like to you?‘ (…) They drew a schematic diagram or an architectural rendering of how to bring their neighbourhood into a utopian ideal. I eventually amassed an archive of 120 drawings that looked like my mother’s mixed with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Sol LeWitt.’ Satterwhite later turned the crowd-sourced images into the digital ephemera and coded animations that give Pygmalion its esoteric edge. The recurring themes were : consumerism, nature, infrastructure, domesticity, religion and philosophy. Therapy, self-help and introspection are all forms of healing, according to the artist. (Lambo, 2022)

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"That’s what this film proposes. A narrative about someone healing by accepting all the parts of themself. (…) (The) work speaks about healing internally and externally." (Satterwhite in Mitchell-innes & Nash)

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Pygmalion’s Ugly Season is the 28-minute visual adjunct Satterwhite created for Ugly Season (2022), the latest album by Mike Hadreas, a musician who performs under the stage name ‘Perfume Genius’. The video opens with Satterwhite’s body disintegrating into a network of worlds situated at his joints and chakras. Ever the builder of fantastical dreamscapes, Satterwhite overlays the avatars of pirouetting men in bondage wear with footage of an evangelical Christian congregation overcome by the holy spirit. In another scene, two cyborgs lashed to a travelator made of bike chains convey a bare-chested man, who is cradling a limp Hadreas, through intergalactic space. These vignettes, as wild and attention-seeking as they may seem, are cloaked meditations on desire, human nature, healing and finding utopia. (Lambo, 2022)

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Pygmalion is the culmination of two years of intense creativity for both Satterwhite and Hadreas. Much of the visual narrative in Pygmalion mirrors the lyrical content of the album, which Satterwhite summarises as ‘a lover trying to construct a desirable object and idealizing it to such a large scale that it is unachievable.’ The hypothetical lover is a reference to the Pygmalion of antiquity, a Greek sculptor who falls for his own carving of a woman, which a sympathetic Aphrodite then transforms into a real woman. (Lambo, 2022)