Continue playing
(Time remaining: )
Play from beginning
Continue playing "{{ controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].segmentParentTitle}}"
{{controller.videos[controller.getVideo(controller.currentVideo)].title}} has ended.
Trey Abdella's Miserable Dream
Strolling the boardwalks of Coney Island, artist Trey Abdella gets inspiration from the camp, craft, and engineering hidden within the rides and attractions, discovering surprising new strategies for painting. This documentary short follows the artist as he mines the everyday aesthetics of middle-class America—from “Live Laugh Love” and kitschy home decor to Saturday morning cartoons and amusement park animatronics—peeling back their artifice to reveal the oddities, dysfunction, and disgust that may lie underneath. Abdella’s approach to painting is expansive, embracing materials like pearlescent pigment, glitter, sticks and stones, broken ceramic figurines, servo motors, and holographic fans in works that cannot be contained within a single medium. “When I’m thinking about work, I really think about balance, like looking for this duality that’s kind of sweet and disgusting,” says the artist. As he completes a new work from his Brooklyn studio, Abdella draws upon the wide variety of resources, techniques, and collections he’s amassed, pairing highly skilled representational painting with handicraft and play to create his singular visions of the American Dream and its shortcomings.
Credits
Director: Andrew Nadkarni. Producer: Andrea Chung & Andrew Nadkarni. Executive Producer: Tina Kukielski. Series Producer: Nick Ravich. Cinematography: Pete Quandt & Leroy Farrell. Editor: Peter Zachwieja. Colorist: Cody L Sandberg. Production Sound: Fivel Rothberg. Sound Design: Soobin Ha. Sound Mix: Collin Blendell. Assistant Curator: Jurrell Lewis. Assistant. Editors: Stephanie Cen & Michelle Hanks. Music: DaniHaDani, Nsee, Ada Ragimov, Roie Shpigler, Skies Speak.
Archival Footage: Gus Aronson, Shark Senesac, Dylan Siegel.
Artwork Courtesy: Trey Abdella, David Lewis Gallery, Vito Schnabel Gallery, Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler.
Special Thanks: Jo Gennett, César Martínez Barba, Megan Massey, Katrin Spiridonova, Jordan Tullis, Jenna Yonker.
New York Close Up is made possible with support from Deborah Beckmann and Jacob Kotzubei, Jessica and Natan Bibliowicz, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, the Henry Nias Foundation, and individual contributors.
© Art21, Inc. 2025. All rights reserved.
Closed captionsAvailable in English, German, Romanian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Italian
Through the Art21 Translation Project, multilingual audiences from around the globe can contribute translations, making Art21 films more accessible worldwide.
Interested in showing this film in an exhibition or public screening? To license this video please visit Licensing & Reproduction.
Trey Abdella was born in Manassas, Virginia, in 1994 and currently lives and works in New York, New York. The artist received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and his MFA from the New York Academy of Art in 2019. Primarily working in painting, Abdella’s work pushes the boundaries of the medium: embedding found objects into painted surfaces, introducing kinetic and interactive elements, and extending images into three-dimensional space. His body of work draws upon uniquely American aesthetics and symbols, troubling the idyllic scenes of middle-class life with elements of the uncanny and unsettling, revealing something darker just beneath the surface.