Audience Plant 2027 tickets

Pioneering American artist Ryan Trecartin’s expansive practice in video, installation, sculpture, sound design, and collaborative performance explores the fluid nature of identity and the disorienting interrelationships between the body and language. His practice often begins with writing—poetic texts, narrative scripts, musical compositions, and songs—that collectively create a framework for collaboration and structure the final work. Trecartin and frequent collaborator Lizzie Fitch are the artists most associated with anticipating and capturing the psychic and aesthetic aftereffects of developing forms of technology from the last two decades. Together, they construct elaborate, multi-sensory environments that house discrete works and function as a whole. These densely layered projects make dynamic use of post-production modalities to radically reshape conventions of production and narrative form, while maintaining an enduring interest in work that explores the fluid nature of identity, the unfolding definitions of community, the complexities of subject formation, and personhood. Expanding on performances as part of the Armory’s Artists Studio series curated by Jason Moran in 2016, Moran’s exhibition at Walker Art Center in 2018, and Aspen Art Museum’s commission in 2024, Trecartin and his longtime collaborators create a site-specific performance and installation reimagined for the Wade Thompson Drill Hall. Trecartin creates sonic compositions that blend elements of jazz, pop, ambient noise, video game scores, sound effects, theme songs, and EDM beats into a cascade of shifting passages. These original songs and soundscapes are transformed into a live set, interspersed with rollicking improvised jam sections by a talented group of collaborators including Ashland Mines, Michael Beharie, Aaron David Ross, Jason Moran, and special guest artists that are entirely unique to each performance. Blending a towering performance sculpture with new Armory commissioned film works, this immersive concert installation perfectly showcases the artists’ wholly original approach—at once kaleidoscopic and symphonic, dense and DIY.