Matthew Ritchie: Line Shot at Andrea Rosen

Since Matthew Ritchie exhibited The Universal Adversary at Andrea Rosen Gallery in 2006, his process of synthesizing and expressing complex systems and cosmologies to create new forms and explore new myths has increasingly expanded across disciplines and into collaborative projects with physicists, composers, writers, actors, architects and engineers, aimed at developing a group of visual and performance environments that can
theoretically sustain not one, but every possible representation of the universe.

Simultaneously, Ritchie has been creating a uniquely dynamic digital world built from his drawings, which allows him to film inside this world using a vast bank of images and narratives to inform increasingly sophisticated videos which can then be deployed into these collaborations. One such example is ‘Hypermusic’, a collaboration with physicist Lisa Randall and composer Hector Parra at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, which makes his complex work more relevant and legible to multiple, broader communities and builds a potential description of the idea of creativity itself.

The exhibition is being held in conjunction with The Long Count, part of the Next Wave Festival at Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, October 28, 30, and 31, 2009: a one hour work based on intertwined American creation myths, written and directed by Matthew Ritchie with music by Aaron & Bryce Dessner and featuring Matt Berniger, Kim & Kelley Deal and Shara Worden.

Various works will be exhibited in the gallery, including a series of large paintings that use gorgeous abstract iconography to describe the pure space of creation, Line Shot, a one hour animated feature film, with music and spoken text, Haruspex, a series of drawings made in collaboration with authors and The Dawn Line, a modular structure that is part of The Morning Line: a vast architectural, film and musical collaboration created with architects Aranda\Lasch and Arup AGU with commissioned music by Bryce Dessner & Evan Ziporyn, Lee Ranaldo, Thom Willems, Jon 'Jonsi' Birgisson and others, which will be traveling the world in 2009.

The Long Count references the cosmology of the Popol Vuh and the 1975 and 1976 World Series through twins, mirror sequences, fatal games and broken symmetries. Conceived as an endless creation, a pooled text, with characters understood as ideas in motion, The Long Count builds and dismantles a world before time. As in many of
Ritchie’s works, fragments of games and stories are used as counterpoints and motifs between the various performers and ideas which are quartered, folded and unpacked over and over again.