Captions provided by CCTubes – Captioning the Internet! Premiering December 10, 2025
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
© Art21, Inc. 2025. All rights reserved.
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.