Margaux Williamson's essay on Ryan Trecartan's I-B-Area is kind of double fun as it ends up being insightful about both artists' work: Williamon's as well as Mr. Trecartan's. Her writing style is honest, comfortable with the incompleteness necessary in observing things while being very thorough in analysis. I'll limit this post to lightly tracing out themes addressed in this essay.
(The whole of I-B-Area can be seen on Ubuweb).
Helpful things:
Observations
The figure of mother as the focus of need-rebellion in the contemporary makeshift family. Anyone in these ad hoc groups can become or be looked to as mother. Anyone might shift just as quickly to need mother, or rebel against mother.
Makeshift family as tantamount to contemporary community, society. (This is not family in a biological sense).
Persona is often in a conflicted relationship to community (a dialectic?).
Social media as having supplanted (or mutated) nomadic persona (We now leave evidence behind!).
The human body post inception, a la Walter Benjamin, of the Age of Reproduction, derives pleasure and worth in repeating itself (via recording devices, via dialogue, life as "a constant audition")
Dialogue Transcriptions!
PASTA: I’m in pain, serious pain. Charity, when I was your age, basically, I don’t like your name.
CHARITY: WHAT?!
AMANDA: I like the name Charity.
SEN-TEEN: Ok whatever AmanDUH
PASTA: and I understand this, I do. I changed my name from Uri Anderson Sommerset to Pasta when I was your age. And it was the best decision of my life. I think you need to think about this. This was way back at the end of the millennium.
SEN-TEEN: (pointing at Pasta) you should look up to this person.
PASTA: and not just because your short
CHARITY: whatever.
*
Margaux is a painter, film-maker living in Toronto. She is a favourite contemporary artists as well as trusted source on how the North American contemporary (technological, cultural) complicates and accelerates meaning-production.
The source for this, Marguax Williamson's blog "Movie is my Favourite Word," is a working artist's blog about watching movies in her home. It has all the excitement, and incompleteness, usual to the easy camaraderie and spastic, bright conversations of art friend conspirators.
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