LEGENDARY RYAN TRECARTIN, TAKE IT SERIOUSLY

Ryan Trecartin’s film A Family Finds Entertainment is a camp extravaganza of epic proportions. Starring Trecartin’s family and friends, and the artist himself in a plethora of outrageous roles, 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.



"We consume and consume and puke, more than fetishise the objects and information we use." Ryan Trecartin explains, "We don't act inside or outside of consumer culture, entertainment, or art culture, we consume and translate, we're a by-product of it." Each of Ryan Trecartin's figurative sculptures read like TV sitcom characters gone terribly awry, horrible casualties of media overindulgence. Typecast and too familiar, their physical oddities become gleeful jibes at their dumb and predictable expectation, like the result of a satirical writer taking revenge on his popular creations. Despite the initial revulsion, there's the overwhelming urge to cheer as Vicki Veterinarian (made by Brian McKelligott), a Pet Rescue do-gooder, laughs with thin-veiled chagrin as she's penetrated by her own pussy.


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.