biography1

BIOGRAPHY


1981 Born in Webster, Texas
Lives and works in New Orleans
SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006
I smell pregnant, QED, Los Angeles

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2005
Whitney Biennial 2006, Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

2005
Sympathetic Magic, Screenings of What’s The Love Making Babies For
and Yo a romantic comedy, Planaria, New York

SCREENINGS

2005
A Family Finds Entertainment, New York Underground Film Festival
A Family Finds Entertainment, Chicago Underground Film Festival (special jury prize)
Valentine’s Day Girl, Multiplex, Smack Mellon, Brooklyn
A Family Finds Entertainment, Big Muddy Film Festival, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale

PERFORMANCES

2005
Alternative Theater Endings, with The Experimental People Band, New York Underground Film Festival
Nothing Wrong with August, with The Experimental People Band, Natural Disaster, New Orleans

Made with Jesse Greenberg, Mango Lady was originally shown in Ryan Trecartin’s exhibition I Smell Pregnant, a vast multi-room installation incorporating painting, video, and sculpture as a 3 dimensional ‘set’ and ‘narrative’ rolled into one. Facing the wall, she squats as some repulsive vegan-hippie-fertility totem, all co-ed haircut and pendulous breasts. Deliciously scabby, her entire body is plated in dried fruit. Conceiving his installations as a series of potentials rather than faits accomplis, Trecartin’s work openly shares the processes of its making, each piece relating to the next, forming a free-flow dialogue of strategies, approaches, and ideas. His figurative sculptures act as ‘anchors’ within his shows, creating relationships and conversations with each other, and providing recognisable ‘bridges’ between the viewer and the other work in the gallery. Posited between the familiar and the completely surreal, each sculpture conveys a character or ‘type’ specially cast for the scene.

Structuring his art practice in the same way as a director approaches film making, Ryan Trecartin’s sculptural and installation work incorporates a cast of dozens. Conceiving each show as an experiment in theatrical production, Trecartin conceives loose plots as a basis for collaborative endeavour. Working with a posse of his close mates, Trecartin delegates responsibility: inviting his friends to participate in the creative process, respond to his ideas, and contribute their own input and artwork. Through this unorthodox way of working, Trecartin’s work becomes an uncanny reflection of youth culture, presenting a Gen Y zeitgeist of commodity anxiety, spiritual nihilism, and community value.

Trecartin is currently living in LA as a hurricane Katrina refugee; World Wall was conceived as a form of disaster therapy. Working with fellow artist Lizzie Fitch, the project was begun as a simple wooden fence. Enhanced through a series of Mardi Gras float making techniques, this work evolved into a diaristic tribute to New Orleans, a means of engaging with dislocation and loss. Conceived as both a location and living organism, World Wall sprawls with animistic fervour, a seething monument of chaos, festivity, rebirth, and beauty. Through the window, a picture can be seen of the ruins of Trecartin’s old house.

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/ryan_trecartin.htm
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/ryan_trecartin_world_front.htm

Structuring his art practice in the same way as a director approaches film making, Ryan Trecartin’s sculptural and installation work incorporates a cast of dozens. Conceiving each show as an experiment in theatrical production, Trecartin conceives loose plots as a basis for collaborative endeavour. Working with a posse of his close mates, Trecartin delegates responsibility: inviting his friends to participate in the creative process, respond to his ideas, and contribute their own input and artwork. Through this unorthodox way of working, Trecartin’s work becomes an uncanny reflection of youth culture, presenting a Gen Y zeitgeist of commodity anxiety, spiritual nihilism, and community value.

Trecartin is currently living in LA as a hurricane Katrina refugee; World Wall was conceived as a form of disaster therapy. Working with fellow artist Lizzie Fitch, the project was begun as a simple wooden fence. Enhanced through a series of Mardi Gras float making techniques, this work evolved into a diaristic tribute to New Orleans, a means of engaging with dislocation and loss. Conceived as both a location and living organism, World Wall sprawls with animistic fervour, a seething monument of chaos, festivity, rebirth, and beauty. Through the window, a picture can be seen of the ruins of Trecartin’s old house.

chris burden