Taya Koschnick
2021A Family Finds Entertainment
Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch
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.
A Family Finds Entertainment
P.opular S.ky (section-ish)
Ryan Trecartin
Leilah Weinraub, Daniel Spann
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.
P.opular S.ky (section-ish)
I-Be Area
Ryan Trecartin
Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch
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.
I-Be Area
Ready
Ryan Trecartin
Kenny Curran, Lizzie Fitch
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.
Ready
Temp Stop
Ryan Trecartin
Howie Bierbaum, M. Blash
Temp Stop, as the title implies, has a disjunctive quality that separates it from the other parts of Re'Search Wait'S. As if emanating from the basement of Any Ever, each scene plays like a hidden-away epilogue rendering characters comparatively surreal--in part because they are often straightforward and ordinary. The movie opens with a less omnipotent Y-Ready barking an abusive monologue to hypothetical subservients and bidding Able to use The Re'Search to brainwash JJ into a duplicate of Wait. Able's work alter ego, Past Jessica, is battered by her office. She is out of time, and by that extension, timelessness in Any Ever is not equated with limitlessness but with total lack: no time.
Temp Stop
