Overview
Trisha Baga (b. 1985, Venice, FL) is best known for her installation works combining video, sculpture, painting, and per- formative elements. These works have been exhibited at the 356 Mission in Los Angeles (in 2017), Zabludowicz Collec- tion in London (2014), the Whitney Museum in New York (in 2012), and at Kunstverein München (in 2011), among other places. Baga's environments are highly referential, highly mediated, like the ones we're used to inhabiting while surfing the Internet, going to a shopping mall, or watching a Hollywood film. Unlike blockbusters, which tend to focus and direct our attention, Baga scatters it, to the various details of her immersive, but never authoritarian, media-rich environments.
At Condo 2018, Société will present Baga's Madonna y el Niño (2010–2011). As the curators of MoMA PS1 wrote about the piece when it was shown there, in 2010: “Baga’s Madonna y el Niño combines and reshapes ephemera of the iconic global celebrity—photos, official tour videos, DVD menus, interviews—with references to the El Niño weather phenom- enon and the artist’s own performances.”
As Baga herself said of the work: It can be understood as “a metaphor for changes in the pop landscape brought about by digitization and the internet.”
In all of her work, Baga confronts viewers with layers of visual information. As a result, viewers find themselves over- whelmed, caught between in an environment supersaturated with points of reference. Like a vision of our digital age, but where all the details are handmade, globs of paint, cut-out images, formless sculptures, readymade objects, Baga's work adds up to what one author, writing in Artforum, described as a reflection on “depth and illusion, perspective, and objecthood”.
