2009
Video HD, 33’, 5”
ANY EVER | TRILL-OGY COMP
K-CoreaINC.K (Section A) features actors styled as various corporate beings called “Koreas”; held together in a lightly allegorical cloud of reductive international stereotypes, they are homogenised by their blond wigs, powder, and office-casual attire, the sum of which Trecartin terms “work face.” The video revolves around an unending party-like work meeting led by Global Korea (Telfar Clemens) that goes in circles to evade a traditional dramatic arc. The Koreas seem focused only on absurd self-perpetuation, whereby the maintenance of their careers is the principal goal of their jobs. Amid the din of self-negating office politics, one underling aspires to introduce her own agenda to the workflow. “North American Korea,” (Veronica Gelbaum) as she calls herself, alters the narrativity of the video by advancing linear plot elements, which make the rest of her company vulnerable to being limited by definite temporal locations like “before” and “after.” — Kevin McGarry — Kevin McGarry
Ryan Trecartin’s Any Ever comprises seven autonomous but interrelated videos. The work is structured as a diptych, with Trill-ogy Comp (three movies) as one side and Re’Search Wait’S (four movies) as the other.
The title Trill-ogy Comp freely associates with the words “trill” and “comp”—as in the musical sound resulting from rapidly alternating between two notes, or the phonetic sound produced by rolling Rs, or other iterations of linguistic tremolo; and as in “composition,” “complement,” “comprehension,” and in general, with regard to a sense of built completeness, especially in reference to music and in digital editing. This wordplay hints at the frenetic interplay within Trill-ogy Comp, as well as the role Trill-ogy Comp plays as the more kinetic half of Any Ever. The narrative development of each video follows the structuralist unity of form and content, self-reflexively building formal logics through abstraction. — Kevin McGarry
