Animation Companion is a body of digital prints by Ryan Trecartin featuring characters, creatures and settings arising from recent large-scale collaborative productions with Lizzie Fitch, including the sculptural theaters Site Visit, which was shown at KW, Berlin in 2014–2015, and Priority Innfield, produced for the Venice Biennale in 2013.
Each print is uniquely framed through a process reminiscent of digital texturing. Using materials that recall industrial production, survivalist gear and outdoor leisure pursuits, the frames act as a kind of imitative skin, accentuating the creation and manipulation of forms and layers within the image. The varying estrangement and integration of seemingly discernible people, places or objects leaves each composition with an unstable ground, further reinforced by the fragility of the frames as skins —their fabrics aspiring to a state of animation or conceptual texture.
Tension between real and animated space is further engaged in Lizzie Fitch and Ryan Trecartin's sculptures. In Flock Wipe, a peculiar landscape of familiar domestic objects and decaying fragmented forms is bound together on a trolley by translucent white plastics and foams, simultaneously evoking determined transience and something altogether more menacing.
Throughout Fitch and Trecartin's practice titles function as an initial frame, suggesting the bounds of an abstract space in which readings for the work can be elaborated. The sculptures are informed less by art history than by poetry; they unfold and grow their own references, becoming capacious structures where juxtaposed contexts and interpretations resound.