Summary

Interweaving digitally generated imagery with original footage, Shrines unfolds a late capitalist media landscape in which collective icons constitute and permeate both outside and inside worlds. Viral images from political news, pop, art, and film history invoke situations of biological threat and social tension, states of pharmacological dependence and carnal bondage. Moments of relief and liberation appear in analog film sequences in which Satterwhite stages his body as medium for processing these crisis-ridden realities. In this intersection of painting, performance, and video, Satterwhite continuously challenges a canon of Western art history, and proposes a possible mode of healing from systems of biopolitical, social and cultural exclusion.