Ryan Trecartin
I-Be Area | 2007 | 1:48:00mins | BetaSP | USA
Ryan Trecartin is one of the most innovative young artists working with video today. Trecartin’s fantastical video narratives seem to be conjured from a fever dream. Collaborating with an ensemble cast of family and friends, the 26-year-old Trecartin merges sophisticated digital manipulations with uncanny performances and footage drawn from the Internet and other media. While the astonishing A Family Finds Entertainment has drawn comparisons to Jack Smith, early John Waters, and Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Trecartin crafts startling visions that are thoroughly unique.
Ryan Trecartin was born in 1981 in Webster, Texas. He received a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island in 2004. His works have been seen in group exhibitions including the 2006 Biennial Exhibition of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; USA Today: Works from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Moore Space, Miami, Florida; The Getty Center, Los Angeles; New York Underground Film Festival, New York; Chicago Underground Film Festival, Chicago; and Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, among others. He has had solo exhibitions at QED, Los Angeles and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York. Trecartin, who lived and worked in New Orleans before moving to Los Angeles in 2005, currently lives in Philadelphia, PA.
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Holland Cotter, writing in The New York Times, describes the “sensationally anarchic” video I-Be Area, in which Trecartin uses what Cotter terms “very basic digital tools to create a highly personal narrative art, almost a kind of folk art.”
Cotter writes: “We’re in a house of many tight, messy rooms. In the suburbs? Cyberspace? Hard to say. Anyway, it’s night. A door bangs open. A girl, who is also a boy, dashes in, talking, talking. Other people are already there, in gaudy attire, dire wigs and makeup like paint on de Koonings. Everyone moves in a jerky, speeded-up, look-at-me way and speaks superfast to one another, to the camera, into a cellphone. Phrases whiz by about cloning, family, same-sex adoption, the art world, the end of the world, identity, blogging, the future. Suddenly indoors turns into outdoors, night into day, and we’re at a picnic, in dappled sunshine, with a baby. Then this all reverses, and we’re indoors again. A goth band is pounding away in the kitchen. The house is under siege. Hysteria. Everyone runs through the walls.”
“…For queer artists of Mr. Trecartin’s generation, cross-dressing, cross-identifying and cross-thinking are part of a state of being, not statements of political position. Like the work of John Waters and Jack Smith, his art is about just saying no to life as we think we have seen it and saying yes to zanier, virtual-utopian possibilities.”
Cotter, Holland. “Video Art Thinks Big: That’s Showbiz.” The New York Times. January 6, 2008.
Featured in: Fever Dream
