Any Ever. Consistent with his work to date, the exhibition 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. The space of the museum will be devoted to the non-sequential series of 7 movies produced over the past 3 years with collaborator Lizzie Fitch and contributors ranging from friends and artists to working child actors and reality television performers.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA), presents Any Ever,
the American premiere of artist Ryan Trecartin’s 2007–10 body of work, July 18 through
October 17, 2010, at MOCA Pacific Design Center.
The entire exhibition space will be 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.
RELATED SCREENINGS:
Trill-ogy Comp
MONDAY, JULY 26, 8pm
Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre
611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., CA 90036
Ryan Trecartin’s Trill-ogy Comp (2009, 129 min.) is one half of the artist’s seven-movie diptych entitled Any Ever,
produced over the past three years with collaborator Lizzie Fitch and concurrently installed at MOCA Pacific Design
Center. This theatrical presentation situates the three movies that comprise Trill-ogy Comp in a classical film context,
underscoring the diverse lives and currencies of these works as native to simultaneous cultural contexts including
gallery, Internet, and cinema.
Re’Search Wait’S
TUESDAY, JULY 27, 8pm
Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre
611 N. Fairfax Ave., L.A., CA 90036
Re’Search Wait’S (2009–10, 107 min.) is the other side of Ryan Trecartin’s seven-movie diptych Any Ever. Although none
of Trecartin’s recent works maintain sequential relationships among one another, these four movies seem to catalyze
semblances of plot and character initiated in Trill-ogy Comp. Re’Search Wait’S advances Treacartin’s signature themes of
hyper-contemporary existentialism and evolutions of communication and identity through approaches that seem more
abstract or objective than Trill-ogy Comp’s experimentations revolving around narrative forms.
Image: The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S) 2009-2010. HD video duration 40 min., 9 sec. Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Dee, New York
Media contact:
Lyn Winter Tel 213/633-5390 lwinter@moca.org
Jessica Youn Tel 213/633-5322 jyoun@moca.org
MOCA Pacific Design Center
8687 Melrose Avenue West Hollywood, CA 90069
open 11am to 5pm Tuesday through Friday; 11am to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday; and closed on Monday.
Admission to MOCA Pacific Design Center is always free.