ART CITIES:Milan-Lizzie Fitch & Ryan Trecartin
Known for maniacally-paced films combining color, sound, character and computer effects, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin have been called video art visionaries. The two artists met in 2000 at the Rhode Island School of Design and have been collaborators for the past 14 years. In 2006, at the age of 26, Trecartin became the youngest artist included in the Whitney Biennial.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondazione Prada Archive
The artists explore how cameras, social media, and reality TV have changed the way we engage with the world and with one another. Their videos are made up of props, sets and digital effects they invent themselves. There is no plot, and their characters live in a post-gender, post-racial world, taking on various identities, sexualities, genders, and races. A character can be many people at the same time, shot in offbeat environments created by the artists. Trecartin works with a regular group of collaborators who are free to improvise. The large-scale multimedia installation “Whether Line” by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin, represents the first output of a creative process begun in late 2016, investigating the perpetual promise of “new” terrain and the inherent instability of territorial appropriation. Taking the idealized rurality endemic to back-to-the-land ideologies as a conceptual starting point, the project represents both a return and an escape. Relocating their studio operations to the countryside of Ohio for this work, Fitch and Trecartin conceived the framework for a new movie as a haunted map: a location with its own will and a constellation of permanent built sets which include a large hobby-barn commissary, a lazy river, and a forest watchtower, occupied by a cast of characters who are simultaneously agents and subjects of the map. The artists contort these sites through dislocations of time and memory to explore the notion of borders and boundaries—existential, psychosocial, and physical. Conceived for the Podium, the Deposito and the external courtyard of Fondazione Prada’s Milan complex, the show is staged as an immersive intervention where visitors navigate constructions suggesting both agency and containment, an active state of limbo. Aural and visual echoes of nature and daily life will merge with distortions of familiar spaces such as amusement parks, homesteads, and fortifications, extending the digital and narrative content of the movie. Fitch and Trecartin’s new work probes the desire to escape and the pervasiveness of systems and techniques that bind us together. As part of the exhibition and as an anticipation of the global premiere of the new movie “Whether Line”, Fondazione Prada is presenting “The Movies” the first complete retrospective of movies by Ryan Trecartin. Starting from their first productions, created in 2001 when the two artists were students at the Rhode Island School of Design, Trecartin wrote the scripts, directed and edited the movies, relying on close collaboration with Fitch, who fulfilled a variety of roles ranging from an actor playing the primary characters to the realization of sets and general coordination. Presented as video works in contexts like film festivals and screenings held in museums, galleries and nonprofit spaces, these movies were also exhibited within installations marked by an architectural character, conceived by Fitch and Trecartin as inhabitable displays for spectators. Over the years these poetic settings became more physically complex and interwoven with dense thematic and conceptual concerns, such that the artists came to define them as “sculptural theaters”. They also shared most of these movies online through websites like YouTube and Vimeo, where many are still available today.
Info: Fondazione Prada, Largo Isarco 2, Milan, Duration: 6/4-5/8/19, Days & Hours: Mon & Wed-thu 10:00-19:00, Fri-Sun 10:00-20:00, www.fondazioneprada.org
