In the midst of career-marking solo, at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn and the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, artist Jacolby Satterwhite contemplates some of the most fundamental questions around the relationship between an artist and the works they create. Referencing both a long running fascination with Renaissance painter Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas and his own traumatic experience of surviving childhood cancer, Satterwhite muses that “maybe I’ve been skeptical of mortality my whole life and I’ve been making things to make myself witness these objects and say I’m still here.”
From their Brooklyn studio, photographer Elle Pérez ruminates on power of the photograph to capture the moments that words can’t describe. Shown highlighting excerpts from inspiring texts, reviewing prints, and creating large-scale wall collages of words and images, Pérez explains how they began photographing aspiring entertainment wrestlers in their native Bronx neighborhood. Pérez relates the scripted and choreographed nature of these wrestlers to their own process of creating portrait photography; “I don’t think there’s a way to involve a camera without immediately involving a kind of fiction.”