Since meeting in 2000, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin have established an expansive collaborative practice that includes video, sculpture, sound and installation. Their work plays with the immateriality of the interpersonal exchanges and relationships that characterize our age, as well as the daily self-performativity that fills the Web. They purposefully guide us toward a time when the connections between technologies and humanity have passed a milestone, but before the effects of this ontological change have been fully assessed. As Trecartin says: “I love the idea of technology and culture moving faster than the understanding of those mediums by people.”
Priority Innfield is a “sculptural theater” containing four movies and an ambient sound track presented in five pavilions. The movies, Junior War, Comma Boat, CENTER JENNY and Item Falls (all from 2013), unfold at a furious pace without interruption. Shot in a direct, quasi-amateur style, they explore the potential impacts of information technologies on communication, language and identity, and offer a barrage of frenetic images, absurd retorts and exaggerated poses and movements, drawn from a culture based on constant performativity.
By presenting their movies as installations, Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin create a fluid, open experience in a unified space sealed off from the rest of the world—all the better to underscore the phenomenological and semantic shifts that lie at the heart of their works.
