Ryan Trecartin at LA MoCA
Any Ever July 18 to October 17
By: Bob Fowler - Jul 21, 2010
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 opening reception is Friday, July 16th from 8:30 - 10 PM.
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).
ABOUT THE ARTIST
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.
Any Ever is made possible by endowment support from The Nimoy Fund for New and Emerging Artists. In-kind support is provided by Dwell. Generous support for MOCA Pacific Design Center is provided by Charles S. Cohen.
RELATED SCREENINGS
Trill-ogy Comp
MONDAY, JULY 26, 8pm
Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theatre611 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 Theatre611 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.
INFO 323/655-2510 or cinefamily.org
TICKETS $12 general; $8 MOCA and Cinefamily members
THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, LOS ANGELES (MOCA)
Founded in 1979, MOCA’s mission is to be the defining museum of contemporary art. The institution has achieved astonishing growth in its brief history—with three Los Angeles locations of architectural renown; more than 13,500 members; a world-class permanent collection of nearly 6,000 works international in scope and among the finest in the nation; hallmark education programs that are widely emulated; award-winning publications that present original scholarship; and groundbreaking monographic, touring, and thematic exhibitions of international repute that survey the art of our time. MOCA is a private not-for-profit institution supported by its members, corporate and foundation support, government grants, and admission and retail revenues. MOCA Pacific Design Center is 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. MOCA Grand Avenue and The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA are open 11am to 5pm on Monday and Friday; 11am to 8pm on Thursday; 11am to 6pm on Saturday and Sunday; and closed on Tuesday and Wednesday. General admission is $10 for adults; $5 for students with I.D. and seniors (65+); and free for MOCA members, children under 12, jurors with I.D., and everyone on Thursdays from 5pm to 8pm, courtesy of Wells Fargo. For 24-hour information on current exhibitions, education programs, and special events, call 213/626-6222 or access MOCA online at moca.org
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PACIFIC DESIGN CENTER
Since 2000, the Pacific Design Center has an onsite extension of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), where Charles S. Cohen, contemporary art collector and President and CEO of the Cohen Design Centers, serves as a museum trustee. The Design Centers serve all major international design markets, including Europe, Asia, the Pacific Rim and Latin America through their four locations on the East and West Coasts as well as the Gulf Coasts of Texas and Southern Florida. The Cohen Design Centers are open Monday – Friday from 9-5 PM.
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