Lizzie Fitch

Sibling Topics (Section A)

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin, Ashland Mines

Trecartin returns to his conception of family-as-business-enterprise, casting parent figures as managers and executives on one end of the spectrum, estranged children as freelancers on the other. The director plays four sisters named Ceader, Britt, Adobe and Deno, the boundaries of whom are indistinct. It is difficult to tell where one sister ends and the next begins. The sisters' questing—for identity, for romance, etc.—leads them on an episodic series of adventures, several of which are defined as "premises." A Trecartin premise plays out as a predetermined situation where the character initiating it has already set the tone, terms, and trajectory of the experience in their mind. The actual, lived event serves only as the shading-in of the outline.

P.opular S.ky (section-ish)

Ryan Trecartin

Leilah Weinraub, Daniel Spann

In P.opular S.ky (section ish), a character played by Trecartin informs us that she wants ‘to live in a world where narration is the devil’. The ability to script oneself is an inalienable right, and anything that opposes that right must be rejected.

Any Ever

Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin

Hailed as cartoonish hysteria, showed at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

A Family Finds Entertainment

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch

Ryan Trecartin’s film A Family Finds Entertainment is a camp extravaganza of epic proportions. Starring Trecartin’s family and friends, and the artist himself in a plethora of outrageous roles, A Family Finds Entertainment chronicles the story of mixed up teenager Skippy and his adventures in ‘coming out’. In this over the top celebration of queerness, Trecartin’s film mines the bizarre and endearing in an unabashed pastiche of ‘bad tv’ tropes. Cheesy video special effects, dress-up chess costumes, desperate scripts, and ‘after school special’ melodrama combine in the fluency of youth-culture lingo, reflecting a generation both damaged and affirmed by media consumption.

I-Be Area

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch

Dazzling and raucous, Ryan Trecartin's first feature-length video takes cues from chat rooms, social networking web sites, YouTube, John Waters, and Pee-wee’s Playhouse, and then turns them upside down and inside out to create an entirely singular video genre. In I-BE AREA, Trecartin intertwines the stories of an incredible ensemble cast to follow a day in the life of I-BE II, the rebellious clone of I-BE.

(Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me.)

Ryan Trecartin

Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin

Trecartin describes (Tommy-Chat Just E-mailed Me.) as a "narrative video short that takes place inside and outside of an e-mail." Trecartin's intense visualization of electronic communication is inhabited by a cast of stylized characters: Pam, a lesbian librarian with a screaming baby in an ultra-modern hotel room; Tammy and Beth, who live in an apartment filled with installation art; and Tommy, who is seen in a secluded lake house in the woods. Pam, Tommy and Tammy are all played by Trecartin, who, wearing his signature make-up, jumps back and forth between male and female roles. Totally self-absorbed and equipped with vestigial attention spans, the characters are constantly communicating with one another on the phone or online.

Wayne's World

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch

Trecartin and his collaborator/co-star Lizzie Fitch ponder the messages delivered by the most banal forms of mass media and pop culture in their own unique version of a music video. They voice questions in song and dance segments that feature a deliberately ill-fitting pastiche of discarded fashions of the past two decades and recycled pop-music clichés. Totally immersed in their meticulously crafted private universe, Trecartin and Fitch coyly point at the gaudy artifice surrounding us in our own.

What's The Love Making Babies For

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch

Trecartin's extraordinary digital manipulations reach a new level as he speculates in vivid animation about reproduction, sexuality, and contemporary moralities. Collapsing footage appropriated from television, the Internet, and pop culture, Trecartin and his elaborately costumed collaborators manufacture an alien yet familiar reality. Inside this startling new video world, technophile gods wearing acid-washed denim argue about the future of gender and produce cryptic TV commercials. In a surreal backyard town meeting, characters deliver disjointed polemics assembled from clashing phrases that could have originated in ad campaigns, instant messaging conversations, or twisted episodes of syndicated science fiction. Constructed from the raw material of disposable media clichés and fads, Trecartin's narrative leaves us to answer the riddles he poses.

Temple Time

Ryan Trecartin

Ryan Trecartin, Lizzie Fitch

Shot in a former Masonic temple in Los Angeles – a five-story warren of large, cavernous rooms akin to a windowless convention center – Temple Time unfolds like a horror-movie group expedition in a campsite wasteland. Exploring the mildly eerie wilderness substitute, the characters talk about what they see instead of how they feel, giving the impression that everything they encounter is a discovery. For some characters these discoveries feel like memories of events that are about to repeat – the past and the future seem to occur simultaneously via overlapping layers of reality. The use of different video-capturing technologies – including handheld cameras, drones, and GoPro action cameras mounted to the actors’ bodies – offers numerous perspectives and vantage points, reinforcing Trecartin’s exploitation of cinematic discontinuities. In Temple Time, purpose and agency are constantly delayed and the multi-linear narratives are expressed in a networked sense of time.

Kitchen Girl

Ryan Trecartin

Lizzie Fitch

In Kitchen Girl, Trecartin's frequent collaborator Lizzie Fitch throws herself into a state of total hysteria, portraying a girl who takes the childhood game of "playing house" to a dark and disturbing place. After pretending to cook dinner for her "kids," represented by colorful plush toys, she finds them lacking in appreciation of her efforts and throws them out the window. Fitch's overwrought performance is perfectly matched by Trecartin's skillful, hyperkinetic editing. Together they turn Trecartin's kitchen into a dimly lit world of mental trauma. Combining the innocuous with the malevolent, Fitch and Trecartin escort the viewer on a whirlwind tour of household dysfunction, child abuse, and isolation.

Ready

Ryan Trecartin

Kenny Curran, Lizzie Fitch

In Ready, Wait, played by Trecartin, is introduced as the eponymous figure of the series. Wait waits. He forsakes a "career" in favor of a "job," the execution of which Trecartin calls a "work performance." A careerist like Y-Ready (Veronica Gelbaum) may call the shots, but she is locked in her own endless narcissistic ascent, whereas Wait can retire from his job at anytime, and does, only to come back from vacation marked for containment. A third type of worker, Able (Lizzie Fitch), more fluidly adopts and discards the gestures of job and career, positing herself as a hobbyist who contrives the situations and outcomes she needs to keep her wave going.

Yo! A Romantic Comedy

Ryan Trecartin

Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin

In Yo! A Romantic Comedy, Trecartin borrows clichés from hip-hop culture and genre films to craft a dark, dream-like narrative that veers from comic melodrama to goth fantasy. Applying his signature digital editing and delirious sound processing to remarkable effect, Trecartin creates an alternative narrative universe that suggests a kind of psychodramatic hyper-reality.

Temp Stop

Ryan Trecartin

Howie Bierbaum, M. Blash

Temp Stop, as the title implies, has a disjunctive quality that separates it from the other parts of Re'Search Wait'S. As if emanating from the basement of Any Ever, each scene plays like a hidden-away epilogue rendering characters comparatively surreal--in part because they are often straightforward and ordinary. The movie opens with a less omnipotent Y-Ready barking an abusive monologue to hypothetical subservients and bidding Able to use The Re'Search to brainwash JJ into a duplicate of Wait. Able's work alter ego, Past Jessica, is battered by her office. She is out of time, and by that extension, timelessness in Any Ever is not equated with limitlessness but with total lack: no time.

The Re'Search (Re'Search Wait'S)

Ryan Trecartin

Lizzie Fitch, Ryan Trecartin

The movie is actual market research collected by Wait for Y-Ready. It doubles as the site of Wait's vacation, as well as echoed versions of scenarios from other sections of Any Ever from which characters either reappear or are replicated here as young girls. Separately, it is a production commissioned for Voy, a pigtailed pseudo-Olsen Twin, by her prop lesbian parents. Voy moves in and out of the action, blurring the boundaries of what is inside and outside reality and fiction. There is also the spectacle of beautiful, tortured Sammy B, who promises suicide every day, broadcast online from her pink bedroom. Although her fans watch her to hate her, what they love is to see her feel, and no one will join the audience that would allow her to permanently drop out.