Ryan Trecartin was born in 1981 in Texas. His introduction to video art came when he received a Sony Handycam for his 17th birthday and began to bring it to school. It had a night-vision lens, which allowed him to capture a lot of the youthful mischief that continues to permeate his later work. The Blair Witch Project had recently come out when he received the camera, and it ended up being an interesting way to make friends - he moved around fairly often as a kid (his middle school was geared specifically towards the arts, but for high school he went to a standard school in Ohio). He had already built up a portfolio of drawings, paintings, scuptures, and photographs that got him into RISD, but when he got to RISD he ended up focusing in video and animation, and making several friends who have continued to collaborate with him.
His work tends to either instantly ping viewers’ understanding of reality, or repel and disgust them - and fortunately for him, many art critics have fallen into the first camp. His art deals with him being something of a bridge - he was born at the same time technology and the Internet was advancing at an extremely rapid pace, and was changing the way people his age interacted with each other. He also deals intensely with issues of identity - in one of his pieces, many of the characters are named Jenny, and all of them are trying to live up to their own ideas of the archetypal arch-Jenny. People are painted ridiculous colors and deliver their lines in a stilted, nearly robotic way, while overwhelming the viewer with 8 trillion different stimuli - some have called his films an ADHD simulator, which isn’t at all inaccurate (coming from someone with ADHD). The first time he worked with a fully-written script, he didn’t actually let any of the actors or actresses read it, he would just tell them their lines and have them repeat back until he heard something that worked.
His aesthetic has progressed into a strange fusion of Geocities-esque net-art and early 2000s MTV, while continuing the theme of evolution through technology and what that means for identity. Where he exhibits his work is difficult to explain - his non-video work has been a part of many gallery shows, but his video work has been requested all over the place, from film festivals to art shows (including the MoMA) to niche aesthetic forums on the internet.
His senior thesis, A Family Finds Entertainment (2004), is available here. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5nclmEYkqk
HIs most recent project, Center Jenny (2013), is available here.
I adore him. It's difficult to explain why - his films capture my attention in ways nothing else can, and it feels like he's speaking an incredibly specific language that I can understand.
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