My House at Presentation House Gallery brings together two major American artists – Mike Kelley and Ryan Trecartin– in a daring attempt to “trace a lineage” in American video art. However, it’s impossible to sufficiently describe the visual impact of the exhibition in the space given here since Kelley’s work is canonical and extremely dense in feeling and, as for Trecartin, suffice to say a friend of mine experienced her first panic attack during a screening of his work in a class lecture. 
Ryan Trecartin, Junior War, 2013, HD Video
Trecartin’s films occupy the East and West Gallery and are presented in cinematic format, while Kelley’s work is screened on two TV sets and his feature length “musical” Day Is Done is projected in the middle of the completely lit Centre Gallery, making it feel marginalized in comparison. This curatorial privileging of Trecartin’s work may imply that the conditions for viewing it involve a bit more massaging – hence the generous breathing room and custom seating. Obese couches indicative of suburban home furnishings are provided to ease the watching of A Family Finds Entertainment and Junior War. In the latter movie, shot in his senior year of high school, the artist’s footage of fledgling substance abuse and young men beheading mailboxes at night is no less disturbing than his 2009 works Sibling Topics and K-CorealNC.K. In these, he presents a cast of white-faced “nations-as-corporations” conspiring to “merge” on a party bus, which actually makes the airplane seats given for the screening of it seem comfortable.
It must be said that any lineage from Kelley to Trecartin is only ostensible. We have passed the peak historical moment for an utterly and overly cynical example of club kid affectation and wanton cultural misappropriation (of which Trecartin’s work is paradigmatic). As the pendulum swings back, Kelley’s fragile embodiment of the Banana Man as a flat, futile, and indecisive human being in a video that predates all the other works in the exhibition is more evocative now than the more recent images of an over-stimulated and superficially empowered millennial. In this sense, lineage is moot.
Note: On March 1 at 7:30pm, there will be a screening of multiple videos from Kelley and Trecartin at DIM Cinema, The Cinematheque.
Presentation House Gallery: http://presentationhousegallery.org/
Mike Kelley & Ryan Trecartin: My House continues until March 16.
Steffanie Ling's essays, criticism, and art writing have been published alongside exhibitions, in print, and online in Canada and the United States. She is the editor of Bartleby Review, an occasional pamphlet of criticism and writing in Vancouver, and a curator at CSA Space. She is Akimblog’s Vancouver correspondent and can be followed on Twitter and Instagram @steffbao.
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Mike Kelley & Ryan Trecartin at Presentation House Gallery
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