Lizzie
Fitch

Born in 1981 in Bloomington, Indiana, Lizzie Fitch studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, from which she graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2004. In 2000, while still a student, she met Ryan Trecartin, who was born the same year as her in Webster, Texas; their collaboration began almost immediately. The formation of this duo intimately intertwines the respective practices of the two artists, making them virtually inseparable, as evidenced by the opening of the Fitch-Trecartin collaborative studio in Los Angeles in 2010. Together, they explore the mysteries of an irreversibly digitized world, defined, among other things, by the growing fragmentation of identity and its refraction into its immaterial counterparts. Working against a backdrop of the reversal of the positions of the real and the artificial, Fitch and Trecartin’s collaborative work often reappropriates the syntax of documentary film—notably archival footage, most often from private sources—for fictional purposes and may involve viewing devices with sculptural qualities. The duo’s work thus seems to characterize the present era while also foreshadowing hybrid, even cyborg-like, ways of life—somewhere between the mechanical and the organic.