Data / Ora
Date(s) - 07/10/2022 - 20/12/2022
6:00 pm - 9:00 pm
Luogo
Gió Marconi
Categorie
Trisha Baga
TIME MACHINE
Opening: Friday, October 7, 2022
October 8 – December 20, 2022
From Tuesday to Saturday, 11am – 6pm
Gió Marconi, Via Tadino 20, Milan
Gió Marconi is very pleased to announce TIME MACHINE, American artist’s Trisha Baga’s second solo exhibition at the gallery.
For this exhibition, Baga focuses primarily on their painting practice.
Best known for their immersive video installations, performances and ceramics, Baga has built a reputation for works that test the boundaries between the digital and the real worlds and that explore themes of pop culture, gender identity, politics and environmental issues while nevertheless enticing the viewer with their dreamy and utterly poetic atmosphere. Baga’s is a meandering approach to storytelling. Their videos are multi-layered, collage-like and exempt of a linear structure. Their overall style is reminiscent of online browsing as overt narratives tend to be mostly rejected and are instead being substituted by loose sequences of images.
Parallel to their video production, Baga has always had a particular interest in ceramics – the malleability of the material clay and the ceramic production itself. This interest derives from their involvement with the ceramics club, a loose formation of New York artists who regularly meet at the Greenwich House Pottery in the West Village. Their core pottery subjects include everyday functional objects such as computers, tea kettles, cameras, coffee mugs or picture frames. But they are equally intrigued by the most varied and inventive animal portraits, the highlight of the latter being punk-like, flame-headed, triangularly shaped poodle portraits.
As with most of Baga’s previous work groups, also their recent focus on painting originated from a collaboration. In 2020, Baga founded the painting club P-Lub with fellow artist Lu Zhang and the curator Herb Tam. Throughout the first year of the pandemic, the trio would create one collaborative painting per week and announce an episode of Virtual Studio Visit Loop, a series of conversations between Asian American workers in the cultural sector and artists who reflected on their working and living experiences during the pandemic. This collaboration prompted the artist to become more interested in the process of painting and to devote themselves more thoroughly to this new medium.
On display at the gallery will be a new group of paintings in combination with a variety of ceramic clocks. The paintings are part of a new series in which Baga focuses primarily on computer desktop and screensaver images. Ever since the pandemic started and people have spent an exceeding amount of time in front of their computer screens, Baga has been intrigued by the colourful, oftentimes exotic, lush landscapes which function as screensavers and which oftentimes could not be farther away from the real world: pristine, snow-covered mountain ranges underneath sunny skies, wild rural landscapes or regal arctic icebergs bring an ideal and sublime world into the viewer’s home and onto their computer screens.
The first layer of Baga’s paintings consists of the depiction of this sublime nature which the artist then superimposes with yet another layer of reflections from the real world – be that the reflection of a cell phone screen or a cursor, of an apartment window, a houseplant or a clock: In one of the paintings, pristine icebergs in blue and red float underneath the various reflections of sturdy Costco ceiling lamps. These paintings highlight the juxtaposition of sublime nature and an ideal natural world on the one hand and mundane interiors and one’s own trivial real world on the other hand. In Baga’s new body of work, the analogue world interferes with the digital world and both spheres merge.
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