Ryan Trecartin

“What [Trecartin] has unleashed is larger than himself, which is why both his sudden appearance and continuing evolution are such cause for hope.”—Roberta Smith, New York Times

“The most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties, he is being hailed as the magus of the Internet century.” –Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

Since the debut of his first feature-length video, the 2004 A Family Finds Entertainment, Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981) has been hailed as one of the most exciting artists of his generation. His movies layer the visual and the aural in virtuosic combinations of color, form, drama, and montage to produce a sublime, stream-of-consciousness effect that feels bewilderingly true to life. This volume, the first monograph on Trecartin, includes extended illustrated sections on his seven-part epic Any Ever, 2009–10, as well as I-Be Area, 2007, and A Family Finds Entertainment. A trio of essays by curators Lauren Cornell, Kevin McGarry, and Linda Norden focus on Trecartin’s repurposing of language, his open-source approach to personality and gender, and his extended amplifications of consumer culture. An interview with Trecartin by artist Cindy Sherman provides a revealing glimpse into his collaborative process.

Lauren Cornell is executive director of Rhizome, an organization dedicated to emerging artistic practices engaged with technology, and adjunct curator at the New Museum, New York, where she organizes exhibitions and the monthly New Silent Series.
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Lizzie Fitch is a Los Angeles–based artist and Ryan Trecartin’s primary collaborator.
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Kevin McGarry is a writer working in Los Angeles and New York, and codirector of Migrating Forms, an annual festival of moving image art at Anthology Film Archives.
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Linda Norden is a New York–based curator and writer. Between 2008 and 2010, she was director of the CUNY Graduate Center’s James Gallery. She was the first curator of contemporary art at Harvard Art Museums, and she taught at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies during its early years.

Jeffrey Deitch is director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His first exhibition project at MoCA was Ryan Trecartin¹s Any Ever. Prior to becoming director of MoCA, Deitch operated the well-known gallery Deitch Projects, which produced more than 250 artist projects.

Cindy Sherman is recognized as one of today’s most important living artists, contributing significantly to the emergence of photography as a conceptual medium. Over the course of her thirty-five-year career, Sherman has constructed countless representations of imagined characters in styles including the film still, fashion shoot, Renaissance portrait, among other genres, always using herself as the actor in the work. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, will present a retrospective of her work in 2012.