Ryan Trecartin

Artist Ryan Trecartin's legion of devotees is brilliantly diverse: from American author Dennis Cooper and Brit art behemoth Norman Rosenthal to Hollywood heartthrob James Franco, who interviewed Trecartin exclusively for the new issue of Another

Artist Ryan Trecartin's legion of devotees is brilliantly diverse: from American author Dennis Cooper and Brit art behemoth Norman Rosenthal to Hollywood heartthrob James Franco, who interviewed Trecartin exclusively for the new issue of Another Man, out now. “I’ve been a fan of Ryan’s work since I first saw his 2009 show The Generational: Jesus Than Younger in New York,” explains Franco. “His films have such an extreme do-it-yourself feel – he directs, performs in and edits them all. I’d love to try and work in the way he does.”

Trecartin's hysterical, hypnotic and hyper-real world was discovered in 2005 when a student at Cleveland Institute of Art showed visiting lecturer Sue de Beer a five-minute video clip of Trecartin’s 41-minute odyssey A Family Finds Entertainment on www.friendster.com. Thanks to de Beer’s New York gallery contacts, the rest, as they say, is art history.

Five years on and 28-year-old Trecartin is an award-winning global sensation working at the forefront of digital art. This year he took over MOCA in West Hollywood for Any Ever – the US premiere of his Trill–ogy Comp (2009) and R’Search Wait’S (2010) series of films – and unleashed his work on UK audiences for the first time at Frieze Art Fair and the Liverpool Biennial. Here, Trecartin presents P.opular S.ky (section ish) from his Trill-ogy Comp series.

Text by Ben Cobb

Special thanks to Ryan Trecartin and Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York