[caption id="attachment_12835" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Sibling Topics (section a), 2009"][/caption]
MoMA PS1 is currently hosting artist and filmmaker Ryan Trecartin’s first large-scale museum exhibition in New York, “Any Ever.” Now open in the first floor main galleries at PS1, the exhibition was organized by Klaus Biesenbach, Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large of The Museum of Modern Art, with the assistance of PS1 curatorial assistant Liza Ryan.
“Any Ever” fills seven galleries with film projections and sculptural theater installations. Each viewing room provides different settings for Trecartin’s most recent body of work including picnic tables, airplane seats, bleachers, and beds (which appear to be sourced from IKEA). Altogether “Any Ever” portrays an extra-dimensional world that channels our own existential dramas.
Many of the films were shot in Miami, Florida and spastically explore themes of identity, narrative, language, and visual culture through experimentations with film—with narratives challenging today’s defining, ubiquitous technologies and cultural advances (and our complicated, obsessive, dependent relationship with them). Backdrops throughout the film series reveal houses with brightly colored rooms, walls covered in girly dog posters, a strange placement of furniture and objects, artwork thrown everywhere, and products such as 5 Hour Energy shots, boxes of Cheez-Its, and empty champagne glasses. Characters’ lines throughout the films reveal a convoluted language that express a complicated (and wacky) nature and the themes; lines such as “I’ve been a CEO since birth,” “I love redistributing myself to people who don't know me yet,” and “Once I have a monopoly, I’m gonna rebrand, oh fuck I forgot my appointment. My meditation appointment.”
The show consists of seven autonomous but interrelated videos shown in different viewing rooms with a particular viewing sequence. The videos are structured as a diptych, with “Trill-ogy Comp” comprised of three videos and “Re’Search Wait’S” comprised of four.
“Re’Search Wait’S” includes Ready, The Re’Search, Roamie View: History Enhancement, and Temp Stop. The theme for this half is an industry predicated on the domination of market research. The videos take ideas and images of modern consumer society and transform them into an overload of what is and then change that overload. Characters purposely grip their cell phones within the frame of the shot, clutching and waving them around as they animatedly (and sometimes feverishly or aggressively) speak in jargon-filled sentences. Voice pitches echo in and out as characters dressed in corporate disarray with odd, caked on makeup play with their unkempt wigs and fake hairpieces. Complicating the visual frame more are scenes of videos shot within the video itself, digital cameras snapping pictures within the video, key words in 3D fonts flashing across the screen, and animations dancing about the frame.
One film in the “Re’Search Wait’S” series called Temp Stop explores the injection of technology in our existence. Images in the film are so extremely over-exposed that it makes the viewer question the understanding of ‘real’ and the extremes of reality’s possibility. There are sequences with nudity that openly expose too much—demanding the viewer’s attention and awareness. It is easy to feel awkward while viewing the nude depictions in Temp Stop. The wild characters with extreme makeup and bizarrely accentuated body shapes and features are fascinating yet frightening all at once.
“Trill-ogy Comp” is the other section of the diptych consisting of three videos: K-CorealINC.K (section a), Sibling Topics (section a) and P.opular S.ky (section ish). Formal logic is demonstrated through the narrative absurdities and abstractions.
Sibling Topics is centered on quadruplet sisters with indistinct personal boundaries. It counterbalances the circularity of K-cornealINC.K (section a) and together the two explore dimensions of sequences of events and movement—with which communities form, hybridize, and thrive in any circumstance. Sibling Topics gives us erratic shots of jumping, body rearranging, throwing, awkward movements and distortions of the body. There is a sequence in the film at a vacation house with two characters that strangely and uncomfortably move around the house. The discomfited body movements and twisted use of language make the viewer question ideas of normality (and many times, laugh out loud).
Each video in the “Any Ever” series works to negotiate and manipulate its own connection to time, space, gender, structural elaborations of new forms of technology, and how the viewer considers those connections. Consumer culture is enlarged and forwardly made larger and more obvious.
Trecartin’s “Any Ever” is on view at the MoMA PS1 until September 3, 2011.
[caption id="attachment_12836" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12837" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Ready (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12838" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="K-CoreaINC.K (section a), 2009"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12839" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="P.opular S.ky (section ish), 2009"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12840" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="Roamie View: History Enhancement (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010"][/caption]
[caption id="attachment_12842" align="alignnone" width="560" caption="The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S), 2009-2010"][/caption]
All images courtesy of Elizabeth Dee, New York.
