Presentation House: "My House", Mike Kelley & Ryan Trecartin use Satire in visceral reflections on contemporary american culture -- to March 3, 2016

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In 2012, Tobin Gibson was in Los Angeles attending an art fair as the director of Vancouver’s The Apartment gallery when he chanced upon American art wunderkind Ryan Trecartin. Little did Gibson know the accidental meeting would eventually lead to an ambitious show at Presentation House Gallery in North Vancouver. My House, which continues to March 3, pairs Trecartin with the late Mike Kelley, one of America’s most influential contemporary artists, a man whose sudden death in 2012 was an apparent suicide.

The Trecartin encounter happened at a lounge where Gibson had gone to dance. “I was grabbing a drink and watching people moving through the space and noticed someone dancing in a rather animated way and, sure enough, it was him.” Gibson, who grew up in Ottawa, knew of Trecartin from his studies at the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver and the Chelsea College of Arts in London. But his first deeper encounter with Trecartin’s work was at a 2012 exhibition of recent acquisitions at the Guggenheim museum in New York.

“I stood in this relatively small room which housed his installation – a bedroom that was painted neon green with tubs of plastic fish in a water-like solution – for over an hour, watching his movie and piecing together other objects in the space,” says Gibson. Some visitors passed through without considering the work, but Gibson noticed others lingering, more curious. “I thought, given these reactions, this is important work to explore further.”

Trecartin’s post-millennial movies are known for complex multi-linearity achieved by meshing characters of various genders, identities and personality traits. The props, costumes and scenery are equally important. Trecartin, in a 2013 interview with European curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, said he is “more interested in creating a landscape of possibilities than executing a vision.” An integral part of his process is to collaborate with performers on the set, giving them the freedom to develop and express their characters. “I work with a script,” Trecartin said. “But the set-making, prop-making, casting and wardrobe are all part of the script and they come together in a way that supplies unexpected possibilities that don’t happen when you are dictating.”

Kelley’s videos are generally not as well known as his pictures and sculptures, which include pieces such as More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid, a 1987 work that features a tangled collage of homemade rag dolls, stuffed animals and crocheted blankets, most of which he found at garage sales. And, of course, Kelley’s performances impressed audiences. “He would babble faster than anyone could think,” American artist Tony Oursler is quoted as saying in W Magazine, an American fashion publication, shortly after Kelley’s death. Improvising off absurdist scripts, Kelley usually used the simplest of props: “Transforming himself,” recalls Oursler, “with only a bucket full of water with a whoopee cushion inside it, or a cardboard tube stuffed with tin foil and a microphone.”    

Prior to meeting Trecartin, Gibson had learned about Kelley’s video work at retrospectives in New York and Los Angeles. “I was able to see new bodies and qualities of the work, allowing me to place greater emphasis on his videos,” says Gibson. “I sat and viewed the seven or so pieces and felt deeply affected. You could see how the world and its anxieties became absorbed into Kelley’s entire body of work, and how he carefully considered what was unfolding around him.”

Gibson, a guest curator at Presentation House, initially worked on developing a solo Trecartin exhibition. But it grew into a two-person show to provide greater context. “I wanted to position him within a historical dialogue that highlights the lineage of performance, satire and critique in American video art,” says Gibson, noting the medium’s long history in Southern California and other artists, such as Paul McCarthy, who collaborated with Kelley. My House includes seminal pieces from both artists – Kelley’s Day Is Done, 2005-2006, and Trecartin’s A Family Finds Entertainment, 2004. The show’s title, My House, draws on dream symbolism and psychoanalysis, in which a house is seen to represent the self, as well as ideas of family, ownership and community, themes that recur in both artists’ work.

“My general focus leans towards supporting artists with projects who are asking relevant questions about the world around them, however difficult to discuss or articulate,” says Gibson. “With this, I feel both Kelley and Trecartin are immensely brave as artists in how they have tackled both the aesthetics and content of their work. Between the layered, audio-tuned voices – which become rather poetic – of Trecartin’s movies, or the merged mythological narratives of Oedipus and Kappa in Kelley’s collaboration with Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Kappa, 1986, these works become hard for many to closely relate to at first, or even sit through. 

“However, I think their formal and conceptual thoughts on human relationships and upheaval are topics to seriously reflect upon. Both artists have an incredible way of turning universally private concerns into public discussion that is not only weighted in critique, but also articulated through playful and humorous ways.”

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