Ryan Trecartin

August 29 – November 8, 2009

Deterioration, they said - Shana Moulton / Paper Rad / Ryan Trecartin

The exhibition joins three individual projects by younger generation American artists, who all deal with video aesthetics recalling the 1980s and early 1990s in their works, under one title. In their excessively colorful visual spaces they deal with a culture of excess and trash, releasing a veritable deluge of images. In the tradition of experimental film the three investigate positions for the possibility of unconventional narrative paradigms and the disintegration of identity images – in Shana Moulton’s and Ryan Trecartin’s works the artists themselves often appear. In the process questions are persistently posed at a “truth”, or its deconstruction, in the face of the overloaded visual world, and on the observer’s own normalized taste which is also under scrutiny.
www.migrosmuseum.ch/ausstellung/fs_main.php?object=ausstell&key=110object=ausstell&key=110⟨=en&back=/ausstellung/jahresprogramm.php

September 10, 2008–December 7, 2008

Ryan Trecartin’s videos uncannily reflect his generation, which grew up using the Internet, digital television, and interactive video games. He mixes cheap special effects with absurd narratives in which he and his regular cast of collaborator-friends act out a sort of Lord of the Flies for the 21st century. He tells sad love stories and bizarre family dramas utilizing technology to heighten the action and reflect today’s incessant information overload.

In his latest work, I-BE AREA (2007, 108 min) Trecartin weaves together several unruly stories with fast-moving, fast-talking characters that deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, lifestyle options, virtual identities, and larger questions of an existential nature. I-BE AREA screens in the Video Gallery on the hour, every other hour.

This exhibition is organized by Hammer Curator Ali Subotnick.

http://www.hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/149/

Television Delivers People
December 12, 2007-February 17, 2008

Television Delivers People brings together single-channel video works from the 1970s to the present that examine how an individual viewer is shaped by television's structure and content. These videos also suggest the possibility of an active approach to viewing which remains relevant even as the physical experience of viewing changes. The exhibition takes its title from Richard Serra's video Television Delivers People (1973), which pairs a Muzak soundtrack with a scrolling list of statements describing the manipulative strategies and motivations of corporate advertisers imbedded in television. Works from the late 1970s and early '80s by Dara Birnbaum and Joan Braderman extend Serra's media critique by using strategies of appropriation to deconstruct specific television genres and programs. Videos by Michael Smith and Alex Bag adopt a performative approach in responding to television, acting out characters whose lives are shaped by cable and its endless programming choices. The exhibition also includes videos by a number of young artists who have created experimental narratives reflective of a dense internet culture, where diverse content from television, film, and music is immediately accessible and available for manipulation and response. Curator: Gary Carrion-Murayari

http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/past.jsp