TOKYO.- Prada presents the exhibition “Lizzie Fitch | Ryan Trecartin: It Waives Back”, organized with the support of Fondazione Prada, at Prada Aoyama Tokyo from 24 October 2024 to 13 January 2025. The sixth floor of the building, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, will host the first presentation of this project by American collaborative artists Fitch | Trecartin in Asia, and their first solo show in Japan.
This exhibition of new movies and sculptures is part of a broader body of work that began in 2016 when the artists moved their home and studio to rural Ohio. The foundational body of work, titled “Whether Line”, was commissioned by Fondazione Prada and debuted in 2019 as a large-scale multimedia installation in Milan. The exhibition included a movie, extensive animation works, and sound design that spanned multiple buildings at Fondazione Prada’s Milan venue. The Ohio property serves as the setting for the movie, where the artists constructed permanent movie sets, including a monumental lazy river/trench, a large hobby-barn commissary, and a 50-foot forest watchtower. Central to this body of work are the contested ideas of territory and property and how these ideas impact the development of the self.
As explained by the artists, “Our project in Ohio is intended to be a ‘life project,’ providing space for experimentation and collaboration. Our goal is to allow the purpose of the space to evolve and grow. We are interested in nurturing and cultivating the site and its features in the same way that we have been nurturing and cultivating its plants. We envision the project as a dynamic environment that expands and changes over time in a kind of call-and-response with our larger network of collaborators.”
In undertaking this new body of work for their Tokyo exhibition, the artists have revisited the hundreds of hours of footage shot during the making of “Whether Line”. This working process of re-engaging with their own work, which they have done in previous projects, expands on their concept of "version-hood" – where many truths can coexist at the same time. In “Whether Line”, characters, narrative elements, and time itself are location- based. These core ideas are further explored in “It Waives Back”, where characters simultaneously occupy multiple states of being – figuratively and physically. The works featured utilize gaming environments conceptually, narratively, and aesthetically to explore the generative potential, and limitations, of game-like social frameworks and systems.
For “It Waives Back”, the artists will present a large-scale installation, two movies, and a series of freestanding sculptures. The sculptural theatre, a signature installation motif of the artists, takes the form of a hybrid environment consisting of a wooden structure and a darkened greenhouse. The resulting architectural gesture embodies contrasting notions of boundaries: inside and outside, viewer and participant, leisure and work. The two screens on which the movies are projected are placed on opposite sides of the same wall, providing multiple vantage points whereby visitors are both observing and being observed.
Each of the movies in the exhibition consider key ideas for the artists in distinct ways. In the movie TITLE WAIVE, time is a central element of the work. With footage shot at various intervals between 2017 and 2024, the movie features the continuous expansion of characters, settings, and scenes. Time also plays an editorial role shaping the narrative and influencing the editing. This process demonstrates how shifting narratives can collapse and reintegrate timeframes and highlights how the artists experience memory and time as “a continuous living whole." The other movie featured, Waives Back (Whether Line), combines live-action footage with animated transitions from scene-to-scene. Created by longtime collaborator Rhett LaRue, these sequences use different states of the artist’s Ohio property and permanent sets to situate the scenes as features on a map rather than points within a plot.
Sound design features prominently throughout this new body of work. Musical compositions, written by Trecartin and recorded live in Aspen, Colorado, in August 2024, punctuate the movie. Music and live performance are foundational elements of Fitch | Trecartin artistic practices, which employ digital music production software to create, dismantle and reconfigure a vast catalogue of soundtracks that are often integrated into their sculptural theatres and movies.
A series of new sculptural works will complete the exhibition. Select “figurative mise-en- scène” are composed of small groups of human figures that evoke social science-fiction imagery. Conceived as characters or mascots within a theme park, these sculptures visually and psychologically connect the audience with the other work on display. Two large-scale sculptures, built utilizing construction techniques familiar to the Ohio area, are inspired by tombstones, memorials, public landmark structures and yard signs. These works explore the narrative potential of these urban elements and sometimes include dark, witty, or even banal commentary. The sculptures conceptually act as “subtitles” for the two movies in the exhibition, revealing hidden and/or lost meanings within the moving images.
Lizzie Fitch (born in 1981 in Bloomington, Indiana) and Ryan Trecartin (born in 1981 in Webster, Texas) live and work in Athens, Ohio. They have worked together since meeting at Rhode Island School of Design in 2000. Their collaborative work has been included in exhibitions at major institutions around the world, including: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA (2006); MoMA PS1, Long Island City, USA (2011); Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, France (2011–12); Venice Biennale, Italy (2013); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany (2014– 15), Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2018), and Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2019).
Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin are acclaimed for a collaborative practice that fuses non-linear videos with immersive installations. Rhizome-like narratives and an imploding dramaturgical logic characterize their video work. Protagonists embody fluid gender roles and forms of fragmented subjectivity in a buoyant clash of reality TV and social-media identity tropes.
