Ryan Trecartin
1981–

Ryan Trecartin’s distinctive video aesthetic absorbs and reconfigures the visual and linguistic clutter of technology, culture, consumerism, psychology, and identity at the beginning of the new millennium. These frenzied, multilinear narratives are the product of an artist who came of age alongside the Internet; the works’ manic pace and fluid structure reflect Trecartin’s acute understanding of media and its social machinations.

Trecartin studied film, video, and animation at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he received his BFA in 2004. His senior thesis project, A Family Finds Entertainment, remains one of his most celebrated videos. It features the artist, his family and friends, and performers— including his longtime collaborator Lizzie Fitch—who move through highly stylized sets, wear eccentric costumes, and recite fragmented declarative lines in a mix of dialects. While exhibiting some affinities with the experimental films of Jack Smith and John Waters, Trecartin’s work departs from those historical precedents by rendering queerness as a mode of social interaction that is fluid, shifting, and, ultimately, independent of notions of sexuality. Several storylines unfold in his video, a mix of real-world scenarios and a fantastical inner cosmos depicted through the use of colorful animations. One central narrative is driven by the character Skippy (played by Trecartin), a postadolescent in the midst of sexual, existential, and psychological crises. Through life-and-death encounters and melodramatic exchanges, the characters— all of whom are hybrids of genders and class types—work through adolescent social mores that culminate in an orgiastic party ending in fireworks.

Introduction

Ryan Trecartin (born 1981) is an American artist and filmmaker currently based in Athens, Ohio. He studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2004. Trecartin has since lived and worked in New Orleans, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Miami. His creative partner and long-term collaborator is Lizzie Fitch, an artist that he has been working with since 2000.

In 2006, the Wall Street Journal included Trecartin in a selection of ten top emerging US artists including Dash Snow, Rosson Crow, Zane Lewis, and Keegan McHargue. More recently, in 2009, Trecartin was the recipient of the inaugural Jack Wolgin International Competition in the Fine Arts, the world's largest juried individual fine art prize, awarded by Tyler School of Art; he received the New Artist of the Year Award at The First Annual Art Awards hosted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and he was awarded a 2009 Pew Fellowship in the Arts.

His work is featured in the Saatchi Gallery collection and has appeared in many museum exhibitions including The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at The New Museum in New York City, Queer Voice at the ICA in Philadelphia, Between Two Deaths at the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, and the 2006 Whitney Biennial, as well as in recent solo exhibitions at The Power Plant in Toronto, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, among others.