Ryan Trecartin, K-CoreaINC.K (section a), 2009, HD Video, 33:05, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York. |
Ryan Trecartin's Seven-Gallery Tour de Force at MoMA PS1 |
Ryan Trecartin, Composite image from Sibling Topics (Section A and Section B), 2009, Single-channel video installation sets and installation in collaboration with Lizzie Fitch from image on the New Museum website, www.newmuseum.org
Ryan Trecartin, The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010, HD Video, 40:09, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010, HD Video, 40:09, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S),, 2009-2010, HD Video, 40:09, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, Sibling Topics (section a), 2009, HD Video, 51:26, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, Sibling Topics (section a), 2009, HD Video, 51:26, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, Roamie View : History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010, HD Video, 28:23, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin,P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009, HD video, 43:51, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York. |
MoMA PS1 MoMA PS1 presents the first large-scale museum exhibition in New York of work by the artist Ryan Trecartin (American, b. 1981). Ryan Trecartin: Any Ever fills seven galleries with sculptural theater installations that house projections of the seven movies comprising Trecartin’s most recent body of work, Any Ever (2009–2010). The exhibition is organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director, MoMA PS1, and Chief Curator at Large, The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of Eliza Ryan, Curatorial Assistant, MoMA PS1. Trecartin’s distinctive cinematic and sculptural language — developed through a close synergy with his primary collaborator, Lizzie Fitch — continues a tradition of art thatm heralds, shapes, and challenges the defining technologies and cultural advances of the era. Consistent with his work to date, Any Ever explores emergent concepts of identity, narrative, language, and visual culture through darkly jubilant, frenetic formal experimentations. Shot in Miami, Florida, and made with contributors ranging from friends and artists to child actors and reality-television performers, Any Ever comprises seven autonomous but interrelated videos. The work is structured as a diptych, with Trill-ogy Comp (three movies) as one section and Re’Search Wait’S (four movies) as the other. Taken together, these videos embark on poetic, formal, and structural elaborations of new forms of technology, language, narrative, identity, and humanity, portraying an extra-dimensional world that channels the existential dramas of our own. The individual videos fit together in shifting combinations, with Any Ever’s master narrative chosen by each viewer. Trill-ogy Comp Trill-ogy Comp consists of three movies: K-CoreaINC.K (section a), Sibling Topics (section a), and P.opular S.ky (section ish). The title of this piece of the Any Ever diptych riffs on the words “trill” — as in the rapid alternation of two notes, or the sound produced by rolling "r"s — and “comp” — as in “complement,” “comprehension,” and, especially in regard to music and digital editing, “composition.” Each movie follows the structuralist unity of form and content, self-reflexively building and demonstrating formal logic through narrative abstractions. K-CoreaINC.K (section a) features actors styled as corporate beings called “Koreas.” Held together in a lightly allegorical cloud of reductive international stereotypes, they are homogenized by their blond wigs, powder, and office-casual attire. The video revolves around an unending party-like meeting, led by Global Korea (Telfar Clemens), whose circular narrative evades a traditional dramatic arc. The Koreas seem focused only on absurd self-perpetuation, whereby the maintenance of their careers is the principal goal of their jobs. Sibling Topics (section a) adopts a narrative and style that are more cinematic and seemingly straightforward than any of Trecartin’s other works. The artist plays quadruplet sisters named Ceader, Britt, Adobe, and Deno, whose personal boundaries are indistinct, as is the nature of their group dynamic, which seems both familial and corporate. Sibling Topics counterbalances the circularity of K-CoreaINC.K, and together the two videos explore dimensions of narrative absurdity as well as the persistence with which communities form, hybridize, and thrive in any circumstance P.opular S.ky (section ish) submerges characters from other sections of Any Ever into an extreme poetic state where their creative limits bloom, but perhaps only on an illusory level. The events of P.opular S.ky are the fevered and shadowy projections of a mind being played with. Whether real or not, these situations key the arc and understanding of the rest of Trill-ogy Comp by depicting versions of their finalities. Re’Search Wait’S Re’Search Wait’S comprises four movies: Ready, The Re’Search, Roamie View: History Enhancement, and Temp Stop. The setting for this part of the Any Ever diptych is an industry predicated on the supremacy of metaphysically evolved market research. As a picture of modern consumer society taken to an extreme, Re’Search Wait’S verges on social science fiction and ties together the two sections of the diptych as a yin and yang of nihilism and boundless meaning. In Ready, the character Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. He forsakes a career in favor of a job, the execution of which Trecartin calls a “work performance.” Wait is joined by a careerist, Ready (Veronica Gelbaum), who calls the shots but is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent. A third type of worker, Able (Lizzie Fitch), more fluidly adopts and discards the gestures of job and career, positing herself as a hobbyist who contrives the situations and outcomes she needs to keep her going. The idea of “transumerism,” or consumerism driven by experience, is also introduced as a central theme and underlies the plight of the character JJ. Roamie View : History Enhancement reveals the character JJ as a husk of his former self. In the movie he hires Roamie Hood’s (Alison Powell) company to roam backwards through time to research an opportunity for an edit that could alter his future-present. With Backseat Grace (Rachel Lord) and Liberty Lance (Liz Rywelski), Roamie enters the suburban lair of three average teenage boys and then an animated environment strewn with stock footage videos of female assistants in both corporate and shopping settings. Traversing times and possibilities as if they were physical places, Roamie View: History Enhancement foregoes the importance of grasping who one is in favor of where. The Re’Search is a “tween-aged” microcosm of Any Ever. Functioning as market research collected by the character Wait for the character Ready, the movie doubles as the site of Wait’s vacation. Echoed versions of scenarios from other sections of Any Ever play out here, and characters either reappear or are replicated as young girls. It is also a production commissioned for the character Voy, who moves in and out of the action while blurring the boundaries of what is inside and outside reality and fiction. Temp Stop, as the title implies, has a disjunctive quality that separates it from the other parts of Re’Search Wait’S. As if emanating from the basement of Any Ever, each scene plays like a hidden epilogue in which the characters appear surreal — in part because they are often so ordinary. |
Ryan Trecartin, Ready (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010, HD Video, 26:50, Image courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York. |
Ryan Trecartin |
Surveying the Ecstasies and Seven Movies of Ryan Trecartin |
Ryan Trecartin, Screencap from I-Be Area.
Ryan Trecartin, Re’Search Wait’S (Edit 1: Missing Re’Search Corruption Budget), 2009 HD Video Duration 1 hour 8 minutes Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, Re’Search Wait’S (Edit 1: Missing Re’Search Corruption Budget), 2009 HD Video Duration 1 hour 8 minutes Courtesy the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York.
Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch with Lindsay Beebe, Mr. Ashley, 2006, Mixed media, 82 x 26 x 36".
Ryan Trecartin, Mango Lady. |
MOCA-Pacific Design Center The entire exhibition space will be devoted to the non-sequential series of seven movies produced over the past three years with collaborator Lizzie Fitch and contributors ranging from friends and artists to working child actors and reality television performers. Any Ever, shot in Miami, is structurally conceived as a diptych consisting of a trilogy, Trill-ogy Comp (2009), and a quartet, Re’Search Wait’S (2009-10). The seven movies are interconnected spatially via networked viewing rooms and an ambient soundscape, and materially by characters, semblances of plot, and recurring formal motifs. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), presents Any Ever, the American premiere of artist Ryan Trecartin's 2007-10 bodyof work. Trecartin emerged from the 2000s as an innovator of ecstatic new frontiers in art and cinema. The influence of his practice has grown within the art world and among a broader, intergenerational set of thinkers and cultural consumers. Consistent with his work to date, Any Ever mines emergent evolutions of identity, narrative, language, and visual culture for content and propels these matters forward as expressive mediums, through darkly jubilant and categorically frenetic formal experimentations. Trecartin’s distinctive cinematic language — and sculptural language developed through a close synergy with Fitch — continues an important tradition of art that heralds, shapes, and challenges the defining technologies and cultural advances of an era. “Ryan Trecartin has invented a new cinematic language that corresponds to the way people experience the Internet. His work has inspired a younger generation of filmmakers, as well as other artists,” comments incoming MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch. David Bradshaw is the coordinating curator for MOCA’s installation of Any Ever, where the exhibition marks the first American presentation on an international tour that began at The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada (March 2010). It will continue to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL (2011), before traveling to further international venues. In 2011, Trecartin will also be the subject of solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, and the Musée d’Art modern de la Ville de Paris, France. Forthcoming print and digital catalogues will be the first publications uniquely dedicated to Trecartin’s work and will reflect the entirety of his practice to date. Over the past decade, Trecartin has lived and worked itinerantly with an evolving group of creative peers in cities across the nation: Providence, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Miami — and now, again, Los Angeles. MOCA’s presentation of Any Ever coincides with the artist’s relocation to the West Coast. Trecartin and Fitch’s migration to Southern California also coincides with arrivals in the area by several previously East Coast–based collaborators, including Kevin McGarry (writer and curator), Sergio Pastor (poet), and Alison Powell (artist and performer). Los Angeles is already home to several of Trecartin’s ongoing collaborators, including Veronica Gelbaum (artist), Mary Ann Heagerty (artist and producer), Rhett LaRue (artist and architecture student), Ashland Mines (sound engineer), and Leilah Weinraub (film director). Ryan Trecartin was born in Texas in 1981 and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. He has been featured in international group exhibitions, including 10,000 Lives, The Eighth Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea; Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, UK (both forthcoming 2010); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, The New Museum, New York, NY; 100 Years, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (all 2009); and Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. He has also had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2009); Hammer Projects at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2008); and Elizabeth Dee, New York, NY (2007). In 2009, Trecartin was the first recipient of both the Jack Wolgin Fine Arts Prize presented by Tyler University in Philadelphia, PA, and the Calvin Klein Collection New Artist of the Year Award at The First Annual Art Awards presented by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.
Ryan Trecartin, World Wall (side), 2006, Mixed Media, 111 x 295 x 59".
Ryan Trecartin, World Wall (side), 2006, Mixed Media, 111 x 295 x 59".
Ryan Trecartin, Mother (side), 2006, Mixed media, 93 x 36 x 30". |
Ryan Trecartin |
Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004, DVD, 41 minutes 12 seconds. |
Media Povera and the Bathos of an Info-Savvy Generation |
Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area, 2007, Video, 1hr 48 minutes.
Francis Alÿs, Still from Paradox of Praxis 1, (Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing), 1997, Video, Courtesy of David Zwirner, New York.
Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004, DVD, 41 minutes 12 seconds.
Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004, DVD, 41 minutes 12 seconds. |
Hammer Museum Ryan Trecartin’s videos uncannily reflect his generation, which grew up using the Internet, digital television, and interactive video games. He mixes cheap special effects with absurd narratives in which he and his regular cast of collaborator-friends act out a sort of Lord of the Flies for the 21st century. He tells sad love stories and bizarre family dramas utilizing technology to heighten the action and reflect today’s incessant information overload. In his latest work, I-BE AREA (2007, 108 min) Trecartin weaves together several unruly stories with fast-moving, fast-talking characters that deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, lifestyle options, virtual identities, and larger questions of an existential nature. I-BE AREA screens in the Video Gallery on the hour, every other hour. This exhibition is organized by Hammer Curator Ali Subotnick. Structuring his art practice in the same way as a director approaches film making, Ryan Trecartin’s sculptural and installation work incorporates a cast of dozens. Conceiving each show as an experiment in theatrical production, Trecartin conceives loose plots as a basis for collaborative endeavour. Working with a posse of his close mates, Trecartin delegates responsibility: inviting his friends to participate in the creative process, respond to his ideas, and contribute their own input and artwork. Through this unorthodox way of working, Trecartin’s work becomes an uncanny reflection of youth culture, presenting a Gen Y zeitgeist of commodity anxiety, spiritual nihilism, and community value. Trecartin lives in Los Angeles as a hurricane Katrina refugee; his installation World Wall, 2006, was conceived as a form of disaster therapy. Working with fellow artist Lizzie Fitch, the project was begun as a simple wooden fence. Enhanced through a series of Mardi Gras float making techniques, this work evolved into a diaristic tribute to New Orleans, a means of engaging with dislocation and loss. Conceived as both a location and living organism, World Wall sprawls with animistic fervour, a seething monument of chaos, festivity, rebirth, and beauty. Through the window, a picture can be seen of the ruins of Trecartin’s old house. Ryan Trecartin (b.1981, Webster, Texas) studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004. His work has been exhibited at The Moore Space in Miami and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He participated in the 2006 Whitney Biennale at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the USA Today exhibition at The Royal Academy in London. His work is featured in the Saatchi Gallery collection. He is represented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.
Ryan Trecartin, A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004, DVD, 41 minutes 12 seconds. |
Ryan Trecartin, I-Be Area, 2007, Video, 1hr 48 minutes. |
