Elizabeth Dee Gallery is proud to announce the debut exhibition of new work by Ryan Trecartin, featuring the international premier of his new movie I-BE AREA. The exhibition space will transform and relate themes of the new movie by presenting it in two ways. The front gallery will function as a psychological space-a relic of Jaime’s area (an important setting in the film)-combining material situations and new sculptural installations with the feature length piece presented on a monitor. The back gallery will serve as a screening room for its projection. There will be a reception for the artist on September 8th from 6:00pm to 8:00pm at the gallery, located at 545 West 20th Street. In conjunction with the exhibition, a special one night only theater screening of Trecartin’s I-BE AREA will be held at midnight at Anthology Film Archives, 32 Second Avenue.

Multi-layered, multi-faceted, and exploding with a riotous assortment of characters and visual effects, I-BE AREA relates the intertwined stories of a series of new characters, played by Trecartin and a cast of dozens in a visually and verbally complex narrative. Existential quandaries abound as the characters deal with such themes as cloning, adoption, self-mediation, life-style options, virtual identities and the perplexities and possibilities of life in this digi-cyber age. The centerpiece of the movie is a literal and metaphorical space called Jaime’s Area, which functions as a kind of bedroom-classroom-drama-department-blog-space-internet-community-site where the characters come to realize their own creative potential and sense of empowerment.

Hailed by critics as “intuitive.rigorous and sophisticated, grounded in his expert editing and inordinate gift for constructing complex avant-garde narratives,”[1] Trecartin’s process is founded upon a fluid yet orchestrated interaction between the artist and a group of collaborators-his friends, family, fellow artists, and various acquaintances he meets on the internet. These collaborators create and respond to a scripted variety of characters, themes, phrases, settings, and even vocal accents provided by Trecartin, who directs, stars in, and videotapes the resulting scenarios. Filmic segments then serve as raw material that the artist meticulously arranges and edits by digitally manipulating each frame and by intercutting and layering an assortment of synthetic imagery. The final work articulates a next-generation vision of contemporary culture and collaboration that collapses video, internet, television, performance, digital technology and sound into one unique manifestation, culminating in an entirely new mode of the medium.