Rhett LaRue

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."

The video displays Fitch and Trecartin's signature style of ludicrous cut-scenes and ironic hyperbole. “Yielders Path” also features swerving point-of-view shots from a quadrocopter, often focusing on ceiling fixtures with stoic reverence. The plot oscillates between mundane detail and highly saturated shenanigans, reiterated by a bazaar soundtrack that punctuates atmospheric compositions with pop music. “Yeilders Path” is presented on the ceiling of a black-curtained room, positioned with the same perspective of much of it’s subject matter. A large futon and theater seats nestled between fake plants provide an inviting viewing environment.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Dazzling and raucous, Ryan Trecartin's first feature-length video takes cues from chat rooms, social networking web sites, YouTube, John Waters, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and then turns them upside down and inside out to create an entirely singular video genre. In I-BE AREA, Trecartin intertwines the stories of an incredible ensemble cast to follow a day in the life of I-BE II, the rebellious clone of I-BE.

In Item Falls, we are peaking. We start out at a casting call, but before long we're firmly in the grip of hallucination, shedding our anxieties and evidently regressing to the animation era, a time when stunt chickens were mere chicklets. Friendly archetypes float in and out of what seems like our bedroom. The red-headed Jenny has returned, but this time she's squeaky and trusting. Unlike in Center Jenny, here our perspective is literally centered. The camera seems to be the in middle of the room, which is good, because we're too blissed out to move. Luckily, our hallucinations look directly at us.

Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me.) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles. Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the characters are constantly communicating with one another on the phone or online.