Trey Abdella's Miserable Dream

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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.

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