LOS ANGELES, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), presents Any Ever, the American premiere of artist Ryan Trecartin’s 2007–10 body of work through October 17, 2010, at MOCA Pacific Design Center.
The entire exhibition space is devoted to the non-sequential series of seven movies produced over the past three years with collaborator Lizzie Fitch and contributors ranging from friends and artists to working child actors and reality television performers. Any Ever, shot in Miami, is structurally conceived as a diptych consisting of a trilogy, Trill-ogy Comp (2009), and a quartet, Re’Search Wait’S (2009–10). The seven movies are interconnected spatially via networked viewing rooms and an ambient soundscape, and materially by characters, semblances of plot, and recurring formal motifs.
Trecartin emerged from the 2000s as an innovator of ecstatic new frontiers in art and cinema. The influence of his practice has grown within the art world and among a broader, intergenerational set of thinkers and cultural consumers. Consistent with his work to date, Any Ever mines emergent evolutions of identity, narrative, language, and visual culture for content and propels these matters forward as expressive mediums, through darkly jubilant and categorically frenetic formal experimentations. Trecartin’s distinctive cinematic language—and sculptural language developed through a close synergy with Fitch—continues an important tradition of art that heralds, shapes, and challenges the defining technologies and cultural advances of an era.
“Ryan Trecartin has invented a new cinematic language that corresponds to the way people experience the Internet. His work has inspired a younger generation of filmmakers, as well as other artists,” comments incoming MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch.
David Bradshaw is the coordinating curator for MOCA’s installation of Any Ever, where the exhibition marks the first American presentation on an international tour that began at The Power Plant in Toronto, Canada (March 2010). It will continue to the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL (2011), before traveling to further international venues. In 2011, Trecartin will also be the subject of solo exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, and the Musée d’Art modern de la Ville de Paris, France. Forthcoming print and digital catalogues will be the first publications uniquely dedicated to Trecartin’s work and will reflect the entirety of his practice to date.
Over the past decade, Trecartin has lived and worked itinerantly with an evolving group of creative peers in cities across the nation: Providence, New Orleans, Philadelphia, Miami—and now, again, Los Angeles. MOCA’s presentation of Any Ever coincides with the artist’s relocation to the West Coast. Trecartin and Fitch’s migration to Southern California also coincides with arrivals in the area by several previously East Coast–based collaborators, including Kevin McGarry (writer and curator), Sergio Pastor (poet), and Alison Powell (artist and performer). Los Angeles is already home to several of Trecartin’s ongoing collaborators, including Veronica Gelbaum (artist), Mary Ann Heagerty (artist and producer), Rhett LaRue (artist and architecture student), Ashland Mines (sound engineer), and Leilah Weinraub (film director).
Ryan Trecartin was born in Texas in 1981 and received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2004. He has been featured in international group exhibitions, including 10,000 Lives, The Eighth Gwangju Biennial, Gwangju, South Korea; Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art, Liverpool, UK (both forthcoming 2010); The Generational: Younger than Jesus, The New Museum, New York, NY; 100 Years, Julia Stoschek Foundation, Düsseldorf, Germany, and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NY (all 2009); and Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. He has also had solo exhibitions at Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria (2009); Hammer Projects at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2008); and Elizabeth Dee, New York, NY (2007). In 2009, Trecartin was the first recipient of both the Jack Wolgin Fine Arts Prize presented by Tyler University in Philadelphia, PA, and the Calvin Klein Collection New Artist of the Year Award at The First Annual Art Awards presented by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY.
