Ryan Trecartin (1981, Webster, Texas) first came to prominence nearly a decade ago, and is widely known for his influential video and sculptural work. His highly inventive art has been a watershed for understanding the totalizing effects of technology and social media on subject formation and the mutability of language. Posing radical challenges both aesthetically and linguistically, his prescient work has become synonymous with the seismic shifts in culture that have defined our post-millennial moment.

Trecartin's worlds amalgamate existing realities into utterly new structures—alien, but accessible through piercingly human assemblies of language, image, and drama, and beneath those edifices, the pains and joys of aspiration His characters experience the same earthly dilemmas born of the primal striving for personal agency in an unprincipled free-market system. While script and story are essential, the editing’s objective is not merely to elucidate character and motivation but to animate them across multiple registers, unbounded by traditional narrative unities of time and space.

This screening (free and open to the public) presents some of Trecartin’s earliest works, predominantly made when he was an undergraduate student. Together these videos reveal how Trecartin utilized digital means to break new ground in cinema, leading the way amongst a community of artists towards the transformation of digital production and online distribution into accepted and fertile platforms in which to develop and present contemporary art.