Center Jenny, 2013
USA, 2013, 53 minutes 15 seconds, HD video
by RYAN TRECARTIN in collaboration with LIZZIE FITCH

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The latest video work by artist and filmmaker RYAN TRECARTIN, entitled Center Jenny, focuses on the life of Jenny who has, according to many of the other characters, become too “left-of-center” while pursuing her interests. As for his previous videos, RYAN TRECARTIN (always in collaboration with LIZZIE FITCH) works with references to mass-culture and consumerism, a panoply of characters and settings drawn from media culture, super-saturated colours, exaggerated dialogues and hallucinatory sound design. Both repelling and riveting, Center Jenny reflects the recurrent disturbing, grotesque and unsettling strain in TRECARTIN‘s imagery.

Needless to say I do like him, may be because there is room in his videos and installations for everything (painting, technology, language, music, movement, lousy, flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonition of death, sex and friendliness) – like in a compact handbag.

The characters are constantly negotiating ideas that I conceive of as architectures: their reality as an architecture, their being as an architecture. The space surrounding these structures is speech; reciprocally, articulation creates space. So, the characters are in the space of speech. Space is a translation of language, of information. Characters are always declaring things to explore and define where they are situated, to find out if they’re participating in the same architecture; to find out if they’re collaborating or not. – RYAN TRECARTIN in conversation with KATIE KITAMURA/HARI KUNZRU for Frieze 

➝ Center Jenny is currently on view – as part of the immersive installation, as yet untitled, – at the 55th Venice Biennale which is running through Sunday, 24 November, 2013.

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