The works of filmmaker and artist Ryan Trecartin, born in 1981, are concerned with his generation of over-stimulated consumers of youth culture. Assuming the role of orchestrator or organizer, Trecartin collaborates with fellow artist friends on film projects, sculptural works, and large installations whose gaudy, fun-house aesthetics reflect the today's clutter of multiplatform cultural refuse. The idea of community and of collaborating to bring disparate parts into a complex, colorful whole is as much a part of his process as it is the enlivening concept of his work. Trecartin negotiates the … (read more)

The works of filmmaker and artist Ryan Trecartin, born in 1981, are concerned with his generation of over-stimulated consumers of youth culture. Assuming the role of orchestrator or organizer, Trecartin collaborates with fellow artist friends on film projects, sculptural works, and large installations whose gaudy, fun-house aesthetics reflect the today's clutter of multiplatform cultural refuse. The idea of community and of collaborating to bring disparate parts into a complex, colorful whole is as much a part of his process as it is the enlivening concept of his work. Trecartin negotiates the new terms of belonging, gender, identity, fame, and the entertainment industry in a dizzying, carnivalesque spectacle.

Trecartin’s own artistic career is in many ways indebted to the media which his works bring into question—a video posted on his Friendster page made it to a curator at the New Museum, bringing him to the fore of a generation of artists who utilize mass media as tools and forums for broader cultural exchange. “We don’t act inside or outside of consumer culture,” Trecartin once explained, “we consume and translate, we’re a by-product of it.” In many ways, Trecartin is reproducing the very culture which shaped him.

Read about Trecartin in the New York Times, January 28, 2009

Read about Trecartin in TOKION Magazine, Fall, 2008

Read a review of Trecartin's I Smell Pregnant exhibition at QED Gallery, Los Angeles in Beautiful Decay Magazine, March 4, 2006

Watch Part 1/5 of Trecartin's video A Family Finds Entertainment (2004) [via WianTreetin]:

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