Ryan Trecartin (born 1981, Webster, Texas) is an artist and filmmaker currently based in Los Angeles. 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Trecartin
Video artist Ryan Trecartin's latest film, Center Jenny officially
came out last month, but what better way to rid ourselves of a communal
Halloween hang over, than to immerse our brains in the psychedelic,
selfie-centred, suburban nightmare that is a Ryan Trecartin video? The
latest in the young artist's series of information-overloaded,
internet-jargon-filled, reality TV-like treatises on online
existentialism is all about media overindulgence — and the damage and
self-affirmation that comes with it.
The editing is pretty rapid in parts, his characters flail around like
hyperactive eight-year-olds — their voices sped up or slowed down and
warped to extremes — and the dialogue based primarily on empty
platitudes and nonsensical, new age style motivational sound bites. If
cleverbots took human form, dropped acid and threw party, their
conversations would sound likes this. You might not be able to watch the
whole thing, but we dare you to try.
Jerico Mandybur
http://oystermag.com/watch-artist-ryan-trecartins-center-jenny
Ryan's films are kind of like that fucked up dream (nightmare) you have
where you wander around the shopping center from your youth, bumping
into people you've known, having random chats, interacting with strange
objects, all the while none of it strings together or makes any sense.
Igor
http://www.omgblog.com/2013/11/omg_priority_innfield_ryan_tre.php#axzz2pZJcbqa6
While there is far less use of glitchy computer effects than in much
his earlier work, Trecartin’s signature erratic cuts, warping sounds and
bizarre dialogue persist.
During the course about an hour, the film follows its massive cast of
tween-inspired characters through a series of short multi-layered
vignettes as they excessively mock each other whilst continuously
obsessing over the one and only “Jimmy West.” 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. We’re also
given a worthwhile glimpse into the Priority Innfield set, a hybrid
combination of a classroom, locker room and an obstacle course that’s
been created in Google Sketch-Up by both Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie
Fitch. This environment is one that remains in flux and continues to
change, much like the loud and bratty characters that seem to inhabit
it.
Kyle Petreycik
http://animalnewyork.com/2013/watch-ryan-trecartins-eerie-new-tween-inspired-center-jenny/
"CENTER JENNY is one of four movies completed in 2013 by Ryan
Trecartin, first shown as part of an installation at the Arsenale during
the 55th Venice Biennale. For this movie and its related works, Lizzie
Fitch and Trecartin created a modular maze of sets on a soundstage with
the help of commercial set builders. Designing with Google’s open source
3D modeling program SketchUP, the artists along with these
tradespeople built a functional system of environments. The space is
rigged to radically adapt for different purposes, but shifting as a
narrative one as well, guiding action much in the way that a written
script does. No pun intended, the set in its various manifestations is a
central feature of CENTER JENNY, where Trecartin fixates on notions of location and proximity but continually eschews any concrete grasp of them.
The cast ranges from collaborators familiar from previous works dating as far back as toA Family Finds Entertainment (2004)
to professional actors from popular television sitcoms. Most belong to
one of several groups of uniformed girls who are all named Jenny. One
duo of Jennys wears earmuffs and pink hoodies branded “AUDITION;”
another posse dons khaki shorts and tank tops covering up
greenscreen-green bikinis; other, grittier girls are in sweats that read
“W4$T3;” a more womanly group in neutral tones identify themselves as
nameless proto-Jennys, held in limbo as they await matriculation into
“The University.”
The various Jennys belong to a caste system in which iterations of the
same, basic, archetypal girl differentiate themselves from one another
based on how powerfully they have evolved. The notion of being “basic”,
in fact, is a flattening condemnation the girls hurl back and forth at
one another. There is a quantitative basis for self-actualization here,
and, as if in a video game or any other kind of entertainment
simulation, a level-based logic propels the Jennys as they graduate from
nothing – “I don’t have a name yet, we’re not even on a level” – to
level one, to level two, and beyond. This guides the plot as well, which
shifts abruptly from one vignette to the next in an arc that escalates
without concern for scenes that have been surpassed by more evolved
ones.
The group dynamic recalls previous works like K-CoreaINC.K, in
which a mass of characters in tan business attire arbitrarily compose a
sort of model UN of delegates from around the world– USA Korea, Brazil
Korea, Canada Korea, etc. However inCENTER JENNY, instead of a
superficial heterogeneity spread across a group as a global microcosm,
everyone is striving to be as similar as possible. Rather, everyone is
mimicking an ideal, and the result among the successful ones is
sameness.
This ideal has a name, “the source,” and one group of Jennys regard its
influence as a kind of Icarus drive, ominously cautioning one girl that
if she continues in her ways she “might end up in touch with the
source.” Proximity to center is an absolute measure of potency. The
possibility of being close enough to touch “the source” runs the risk of
being consumed by the powers that that shape the world they live in.
But any remove from the center connotes vulnerability. Gatekeeper Jennys
brand underlings “left of center”—a designation that others wear
proudly, seemingly for alternative positions along this otherwise
oppressive, concentric continuum.
The movie’s sound and camera crew are often captured onscreen as
peripheral characters that frame the interior action of the Jennys as a
contained production or kind of ethnographic study. Authoritarian
presences like televisions hosts and teachers are other non-Jennys, who
reinforce the rigid, competition-based ecosystem in which they exert
their development.
One girl, then another, declares herself Sara Source — a direct
descendent of the humanity all the other vessels idolize. Whether either
is truly Sara Source is as unclear as whether any of the people in the
movie are people at all, or if they are post-human simulations emulating
constructions of personality and community mythologized as a source
code for social behavior."
Kevin McGarry
http://vman.com/site/content/1845/the-video-center-jenny
CENTER JENNY, 2013 from Ryan Trecartin on Vimeo.
Sunday 5 January 2014
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