Item Falls

Sibling Topics (Section A)

Trecartin returns to his conception of family-as-business-enterprise, casting parent figures as managers and executives on one end of the spectrum, estranged children as freelancers on the other. The director plays four sisters named Ceader, Britt, Adobe and Deno, the boundaries of whom are indistinct. It is difficult to tell where one sister ends and the next begins. The sisters' questing—for identity, for romance, etc.—leads them on an episodic series of adventures, several of which are defined as "premises." A Trecartin premise plays out as a predetermined situation where the character initiating it has already set the tone, terms, and trajectory of the experience in their mind. The actual, lived event serves only as the shading-in of the outline.

Roamie View: History Enhancement

Roamie View: History Enhancement reveals JJ as a husk of his former self, overwhelmed by too many experimental personalities and reverted to factory presets. 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.

A Family Finds Entertainment

A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.

Center Jenny

The film focuses on the life of Jenny who has, according to many of the other characters, become too “left-of-center” while pursuing her interests.

Temp Stop

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-away epilogue rendering characters comparatively surreal--in part because they are often straightforward and ordinary. The movie opens with a less omnipotent Y-Ready barking an abusive monologue to hypothetical subservients and bidding Able to use The Re'Search to brainwash JJ into a duplicate of Wait. Able's work alter ego, Past Jessica, is battered by her office. She is out of time, and by that extension, timelessness in Any Ever is not equated with limitlessness but with total lack: no time.

Panderson Heights

Colony Panderson and Reverse Stacy take watch tower knocks.

Plot Front

A delirious movie installed inside a ghostly barn made with prefabricated materials. The oscillatory movement of the rocking chairs on which visitors sit partly helps to alleviate the syncopated rhythm of the montage and the frenzy of images that follow. A series of brassy characters in wigs and thick make-up map the various locations of the film: a lazy river, a hobby barn, and forest watchtower.

Temple Time

Shot in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles – a five-story warren of large, cavernous rooms akin to a windowless convention center – Temple Time unfolds like a horror-movie group expedition in a campsite wasteland.

Ready

In Ready, Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. Wait waits. He forsakes a "career" in favor of a "job," the execution of which Trecartin calls a "work performance." A careerist like Y-Ready (Veronica Gelbaum) may call the shots, but she is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent, whereas Wait can retire from his job at anytime, and does, only to come back from vacation marked for containment. 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 wave going.

placebo pets

For the tenth anniversary of W's November art issue, supermodels Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid are inducted into the futuristic world of Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin. The resulting project, commissioned for W and titled "placebo pets," features the two models as ultra-domesticated, ultra-friendly humanoid creatures and performance artist and frequent Fitch and Trecartin collaborator Jesse Hoffman as their extraterrestrial "owner."

Junior War

In Junior War, a throng of highschoolers congregate at night for a party in the woods sometime in the year 2000. A band plays, the kids get drunk, the boys and girls tepidly flirt, and groups deploy into cars for the purpose of destroying mailboxes, tee-peeing houses, breaking lawn ornaments, and sparring with the police. The film is composed entirely of footage Trecartin took during his senior year of high school in exurban Ohio; as such, it baits the viewer with genealogical significance.

K-CoreaINC. K (section a)

The video revolves around an unending "meeting" - a busy, aimless meeting that goes in circles to evade a traditional narrative arc. The meeting is essentially a party, and the entire company bumps and grinds with itself everywhere from in boardrooms to airplanes. K-Corea INC. K processes ideas of automation and containment, embodied by these hyper-controlled locations and by the seemingly looping actions that take place in them. Meetings, where discrete parts of a corporate body come together to attempt to "get on the same page," display the futility of corporate unity, and of individual purpose or voice remaining intact within a corporate culture.

Title Waive

A new musical from Ryan Trecartin

What's The Love Making Babies For

Trecartin's extraordinary digital manipulations reach a new level as he speculates in vivid animation about reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities. Collapsing footage appropriated from television, the Internet, and pop culture, Trecartin and his elaborately costumed collaborators manufacture an alien yet familiar reality. Inside this startling new video world, technophile gods wearing acid-washed denim argue about the future of gender and produce cryptic TV commercials. In a surreal backyard town meeting, characters deliver disjointed polemics assembled from clashing phrases that could have originated in ad campaigns, instant messaging conversations, or twisted episodes of syndicated science fiction. Constructed from the raw material of disposable media clichés and fads, Trecartin's narrative leaves us to answer the riddles he poses.

Belly's

This rare collection of Ryan Trecartin's early short films, produced as a student at the Rhode Island School of Design, showcase the artist's maturation in experimental video which would culminate in his debut feature film - "A Family Finds Entertainment." Included are seven of Trecartin's titled short films, ranging from 2001-2003, and a number of secret extras scattered around the DVD menus. While there is no official information to be found about this DVD, the elaborate menu graphics and wildly varied original sound design point to this DVD as potentially a form of portfolio, allowing the artist to showcase their early work alongside original digital manipulations.

P.opular S.ky (section-ish)

In P.opular S.ky (section ish), a character played by Trecartin informs us that she wants ‘to live in a world where narration is the devil’. The ability to script oneself is an inalienable right, and anything that opposes that right must be rejected.