Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch ‘Whether Line,’ at Fondazione Prada

March 31, 2019

Production still from Whether Line. Photo Fitch | Trecartin Studio

Artists Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin release their new work "Whether Line" in Milan, presented by Fondazione Prada Milano. This is the first film from Trecartin since his 2016 series including, "Mark Trade" (2016). If you are in the Milan area, please make sure to experience the film and exhibition running from April 6 through August 5, 2019. Explore the stills from the film below. Text below, courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

Commissioned by Fondazione Prada for its Milan venue, “Whether Line”, the large-scale multimedia installation, conceived by Lizzie Fitch (USA, 1981) and Ryan Trecartin (USA, 1981), 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. The exhibition will be completed with a movie retrospective to be screened at Fondazione Prada’s Cinema.

The project will be accompanied by a book published by Fondazione Prada focusing on Fitch and Trecartin’s expansive collaborative practice which began in 2000.

Text and images courtesy of Fondazione Prada and Fitch | Trecartin Studio

List of exhibited artworks

PODIUM, COURTYARD
Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin
Neighbor Dub, 2019
15 channel sound
Iron, epoxy powder paint, PVC, wood, stanchions
Courtesy of the artists

DEPOSITO
Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin
Plot Front, 2019
4K video, color, sound, 1hr 45min approx.
Wood, sheet metal, carpet, perforated
metal acoustical panels, drywall, paint, PVC siding, bituminous sheath, rockers, lights, ambient sound

Courtesy of the artists

Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin

Property Bath, 2019
with Rhett LaRue
4 channel 4K video, color, sound
Wood, sheet metal, drywall, paint, PVC siding, bituminous sheath, fabric, stanchions, fans, lights, ambient sound

Courtesy of the artists

LIZZIE FITCH | RYAN TRECARTIN

THE MOVIES

CINEMA

“The Movies”

21 movies by Ryan Trecartin, 2001-2016

PROGRAM A

Kitchen Girl, 2001
Video HD, 3’

Valentine's Day Girl, 2001
Video HD, 6’, 50”

Yo! A Romantic Comedy, 2002
Video HD, 12’

Wayne’s World, 2003
Video HD, 8’, 5”

What's the Love Making Babies For?, 2003
Video HD, 21’, 52”