Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin first met as students at the Rhode Island School of Design in the early 2000s and have been living together and collaborating ever since. Trecartin first gained acclaim for his 2004 series A Family Finds Entertainment, a suite of digital videos that articulated the disorienting effects of media immersion and the ways in which the emerging social web was transforming experiences of identity and subjectivity. Over the past decade, Fitch and Trecartin have created increasingly ambitious installations as screening environments for the films, which are primarily written and directed by Trecartin and star a rotating cast of friends and collaborators.  

At Independent New York,  SPRÜTH MAGERS will be presenting Trecartin's Animation Companion (2015), a series of digital prints related to two of Fitch and Trecartin’s recent large-scale productions: Priority Innfield, their project for the 2013 Venice Biennale, and Site Visit, a six-channel video and sound installation originally presented at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 2014-15. Priority Innfield, an installation featuring a suite of four videos, was inspired by Trecartin’s rediscovery of some Camcorder footage he’d shot in high school in the late 1990s: the re-edited footage served as the basis for the film Junior War, which was accompanied by three new videos—"Comma Boat," "Center Jenny," and "Item Falls"—that further explored its themes of youth culture, self-presentation, and social performance.  

Building upon this earlier series, "Site Visit" was shot in an abandoned Masonic Temple in Los Angeles using a mix of hand-held cameras, Go Pro cameras—designed to capture extreme sports footage—and cameras attached to flying drones, along with 3D animations. The result is a frenetic narrative about a group of friends spending the night in a haunted temple, indebted to the scripted reality mode of films like Blair Witch Project. As Trecartin described in a 2016 interview with BOMB Magazine, with these films “we started focusing more on context as being the main character of the movie, rather than on individual personalities. And we used different characters and their behaviors as tools and utensils for the free will of the context rather than the individual.”  

The prints in Animation Companion are digital collages featuring characters and settings derived from the two projects. Reflecting the artists’ interest in creating ambiguous hybrids of real and animated space, the prints produce what the gallery describes as a “premise-based” reality, based on “an agreement between entities that sets the parameters for their interaction. The varying estrangement and integration of seemingly discernible people, places, or objects leaves each composition with an unstable ground.” This experience is augmented by the works’ custom frames, made from assemblages of industrial materials and synthetic fabrics associated with survivalist gear and outdoor leisure pursuits. While the layering of materials in the frames alludes to processes of digital texturing employed in the prints, they also function analogously to the sculptural theaters Fitch and Trecartin produce for the films, which serve both as literal frames and as metaphoric reflections on the artists’ process and ideas.  

Alongside Trecartin's Animation Companion,  SPRÜTH MAGERS' presentation will include Fitch and Trecartin’s sculpture "Flock Wipe" (2015), an agglomeration of household objects—for instance, a fake Ficus tree, a hat, panty hose, a plastic bucket—and home improvement supplies like deck paint, landscaping mats, and storage hooks, all bound together on a trolley cart. The result is a bizarre, even dystopian, take on DIY culture, suggesting a transient landscape of continually repurposed objects. While "Flock Wipe" might recall, at first glance, the incongruous mash-ups of Surrealist assemblage, Fitch and Trecartin’s sculptures are “informed less by art history than poetry,” according to SPRÜTH MAGERS. “They unfold and grow their own references, becoming capacious structures where juxtaposed contexts and interpretations resound.”