Trisha Baga
From issue 8 — February 2020
Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Temple Magazine
I had the chance to see your installation Plymouth Rock at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2012. I was so impressed that even a week after I couldn’t get out of my head the song Conga by Gloria Estefan, which was playing constantly in the exhibition room.
What influences the sound in your installations? Is it a fundamental element? When does it intervene or at least when does it take place in your creative process?
Trisha Baga
Sound is a mood and sound is an object and I like asking myself how it looks like when mood is an object, and also when mood is the vessel for the object. Usually, it has plural operations.
Temple Magazine
There is no narration principle in your videos, the editing you do seem rather intuitive and follow a fluid that crosses several space-time, how is this stage of work built?
Trisha Baga
Extremely inefficiently. What I’m after always is the feeling that the composition always has one element more than can be totally grasped at once. So that logic exists but it’s always just short of accounting for itself. And the sequential thrust always hinges on the just barely graspable thing that is always changing.
So because my process involves grasping just beyond my own understanding, it is a lot of meandering trial and error until I arrive at what I want to feel like a solid body of interdimensional harmonies. Several overlapping narratives oscillating between kinetic and potential states of being. There is a performance element in the editing
process too.
Temple Magazine
The different everyday objects that you organize in space come, integrate and contaminate the projected videos. In your piece World Peace, for example a bottle of water in front of the video projector highlights the fact that Madonna is always in the middle of the image in her music videos. Do you have a particular affection for certain types of objects? Do you collect them a lot?
Trisha Baga
It’s true I’m kind of a hoarder, but sometimes I feel more connected to the hoarding of compositions rather than the hoarding of the actual objects but it changes. In any case it makes it very hard to clean up. Though, I just want to say, and I know I’m being fussy!
That Madonna piece is not only about the center of the frame, the centering is just the organic mechanism which allows the piece to function.
The water bottle would catch Madonna’s dancing body in all her music videos over time, and throw it all over the room, and it did this thing where the subject was transformed into this shifting, room filling aura spewing from a very still bottleshape-and without the distracting specificity of Madonna, it made you listen to the lyrics which (because of heavy catholic imagery) often referred to ‘‘the light’’ and ‘‘my body’ ’ and transfiguration and various forms of wetness, which when combined with the music videos, offered a very emotional perspective on the evolution of image technology. I haven’t thought about that work in a while; it’s a very hard water bottle to find these days. I don’t know how to spell it, it’s Polish!
Temple Magazine
In your work there are recurring elements of the mainstream culture, and also many references to the amateur and vernacular practices of the image. What is important for you to signify by appropriating these elements?
Trisha Baga
I saw a Netflix thing and learned that memory uses the same part of your brain as the act of thinking about the future. I’d say the past needs to be colonized by the future. I know this is a mysterious answer, but I don’t know how to more accurately say it. Maybe you have an idea.
Temple Magazine
How do your painting and sculpture practices increase your video work ?
Trisha Baga
Well, the first thing they do is prevent me from being a 100 % cross eyed computer glued video artist. The technical aspect can be so hypnotic and industrialized. It feels important for me to make things with my hands, it uses a different, less logical part of my brain, and shifts my focus to a sensitivity in regards to composition and layering, and also helps me engage with a longer history of art making and artists. It expands the metaphors when communicating to myself when inside of my work-during the pre language part of the process. Without the tactile element, I feel like my video practice would be equivalent to the act of solving puzzles of my own making.
Temple Magazine
It’s been more than a decade now that artists who use the Internet as tools are united under the term ‘‘post-Internet ’’, how do you relate to this movement, is this term seems questionable to you? And what is your connection to artists like Jon Rafman or Cory Arcangel ?
Trisha Baga
Not much? I’m not speaking about those artists in particular, but I feel like I was in a lot of group shows surrounded by work that was very cynical and clever, in mood and process, and I find my work fundamentally optimistic and sweaty. A lot of ‘‘post-Internet’’ classified work assumed an audience and community that is very global and distant and voyeuristic, where my work is often motivated by and is primarily made for a very physically local audience-basically my friends and neighbors. Also, is there anyone who doesn’t use the internet as a tool? Sometimes I like imagining what the art world was like before email. Low fruit, but just saying!
Temple Magazine
The theme of this issue of the magazine is Crash, what do you connect this word with instinctively?
Trisha Baga
Obviously my constantly crashing computer. Don’t get me started. Nightmares! Also I wonder if that pretty song about a bald guy looking up women’s skirts got stuck in all yalls heads while you were editing this.
Temple Magazine
You’re planning your next personal exhibition at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan for 2020, can you tell us a little more about what you will present?
Trisha Baga
I’m showing a selection of projects ranging from 2005-2020, and I chose them because they lean particularly heavily on reenactment as a compositional tool. They also clarify a recurring narrative of a once whole body’s fragmentation into representation across several mediums including 3D video, found objects, ceramics, amateur electronics, and whole grains. I’ve always loved the natural thru line of watching performance artists and their technology age in their work and am excited to have finally done it myself.
↑
Trisha Baga
From issue 8 — February 2020
Courtesy of the artist and Greene Naftali, New York
Temple Magazine
I had the chance to see your installation Plymouth Rock at the Whitney Museum in New York in 2012. I was so impressed that even a week after I couldn’t get out of my head the song Conga by Gloria Estefan, which was playing constantly in the exhibition room.
What influences the sound in your installations? Is it a fundamental element? When does it intervene or at least when does it take place in your creative process?
Trisha Baga
Sound is a mood and sound is an object and I like asking myself how it looks like when mood is an object, and also when mood is the vessel for the object. Usually, it has plural operations.
Temple Magazine
There is no narration principle in your videos, the editing you do seem rather intuitive and follow a fluid that crosses several space-time, how is this stage of work built?
Trisha Baga
Extremely inefficiently. What I’m after always is the feeling that the composition always has one element more than can be totally grasped at once. So that logic exists but it’s always just short of accounting for itself. And the sequential thrust always hinges on the just barely graspable thing that is always changing.
So because my process involves grasping just beyond my own understanding, it is a lot of meandering trial and error until I arrive at what I want to feel like a solid body of interdimensional harmonies. Several overlapping narratives oscillating between kinetic and potential states of being. There is a performance element in the editing
process too.
Temple Magazine
The different everyday objects that you organize in space come, integrate and contaminate the projected videos. In your piece World Peace, for example a bottle of water in front of the video projector highlights the fact that Madonna is always in the middle of the image in her music videos. Do you have a particular affection for certain types of objects? Do you collect them a lot?
Trisha Baga
It’s true I’m kind of a hoarder, but sometimes I feel more connected to the hoarding of compositions rather than the hoarding of the actual objects but it changes. In any case it makes it very hard to clean up. Though, I just want to say, and I know I’m being fussy!
That Madonna piece is not only about the center of the frame, the centering is just the organic mechanism which allows the piece to function.
The water bottle would catch Madonna’s dancing body in all her music videos over time, and throw it all over the room, and it did this thing where the subject was transformed into this shifting, room filling aura spewing from a very still bottleshape-and without the distracting specificity of Madonna, it made you listen to the lyrics which (because of heavy catholic imagery) often referred to ‘‘the light’’ and ‘‘my body’ ’ and transfiguration and various forms of wetness, which when combined with the music videos, offered a very emotional perspective on the evolution of image technology. I haven’t thought about that work in a while; it’s a very hard water bottle to find these days. I don’t know how to spell it, it’s Polish!
Temple Magazine
In your work there are recurring elements of the mainstream culture, and also many references to the amateur and vernacular practices of the image. What is important for you to signify by appropriating these elements?
Trisha Baga
I saw a Netflix thing and learned that memory uses the same part of your brain as the act of thinking about the future. I’d say the past needs to be colonized by the future. I know this is a mysterious answer, but I don’t know how to more accurately say it. Maybe you have an idea.
Temple Magazine
How do your painting and sculpture practices increase your video work ?
Trisha Baga
Well, the first thing they do is prevent me from being a 100 % cross eyed computer glued video artist. The technical aspect can be so hypnotic and industrialized. It feels important for me to make things with my hands, it uses a different, less logical part of my brain, and shifts my focus to a sensitivity in regards to composition and layering, and also helps me engage with a longer history of art making and artists. It expands the metaphors when communicating to myself when inside of my work-during the pre language part of the process. Without the tactile element, I feel like my video practice would be equivalent to the act of solving puzzles of my own making.
Temple Magazine
It’s been more than a decade now that artists who use the Internet as tools are united under the term ‘‘post-Internet ’’, how do you relate to this movement, is this term seems questionable to you? And what is your connection to artists like Jon Rafman or Cory Arcangel ?
Trisha Baga
Not much? I’m not speaking about those artists in particular, but I feel like I was in a lot of group shows surrounded by work that was very cynical and clever, in mood and process, and I find my work fundamentally optimistic and sweaty. A lot of ‘‘post-Internet’’ classified work assumed an audience and community that is very global and distant and voyeuristic, where my work is often motivated by and is primarily made for a very physically local audience-basically my friends and neighbors. Also, is there anyone who doesn’t use the internet as a tool? Sometimes I like imagining what the art world was like before email. Low fruit, but just saying!
Temple Magazine
The theme of this issue of the magazine is Crash, what do you connect this word with instinctively?
Trisha Baga
Obviously my constantly crashing computer. Don’t get me started. Nightmares! Also I wonder if that pretty song about a bald guy looking up women’s skirts got stuck in all yalls heads while you were editing this.
Temple Magazine
You’re planning your next personal exhibition at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milan for 2020, can you tell us a little more about what you will present?
Trisha Baga
I’m showing a selection of projects ranging from 2005-2020, and I chose them because they lean particularly heavily on reenactment as a compositional tool. They also clarify a recurring narrative of a once whole body’s fragmentation into representation across several mediums including 3D video, found objects, ceramics, amateur electronics, and whole grains. I’ve always loved the natural thru line of watching performance artists and their technology age in their work and am excited to have finally done it myself.
↑
