“The Movies” is the first complete retrospective of films by Ryan Trecartin, that follows the exhibition project “Whether Line” conceieved by Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin and presented at Fondazione Prada from 6 April to 5 August 2019.
Starting from their first productions, created in 2001 when the two artists were students at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island (USA), 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.
“The Movies” gives the opportunity to see all these works in a cinema context, presenting them in three chronologically organized programs. Program A is dedicated to the earliest movies including A Family Finds Entertainment, Trecartin’s final work as a student and the one that brought him renown thanks to its inclusion in the 2006 Whitney Museum Biennial in New York, and the first feature-length movie, I-BE AREA. Program B brings together the seven movies that make up the project Any Ever, subdivided into the trilogy Trill-ogy Comp and the tetralogy Re’Search Wait’S. Program C includes the four movies from the project Priority Innfield, exhibited for the first time at the Venice Biennale in 2013, as well as the last movies the artists realized before moving to Ohio.