Trisha Baga
Orlando
September 3 – October 3, 2015
Ground Floor
Greene Naftali is pleased to present Orlando, an exhibition of new work by New York-based artist Trisha Baga, the artist’s second solo show at the gallery.
Known for her immersive 3D video installations that variously incorporate handcrafted objects with found materials, Baga engages individual perception in a technological economy characterized by accelerated attention spans. Often layering subjects, mediums, and themes through and against one another, Baga’s multimedia installations push perceptual experience to the foreground, staging a dialogue between objects in real and digitized space.
For this exhibition, Baga debuts Orlando, an exhibition that takes place in the far future where peacocks play the dominant species, and whose title references both the city in Florida and the novel by Virginia Woolf. In this temporal landscape, Florida has flooded following a great thaw, with Orlando being one of the last cities to go. The exhibition opens with a text disclaiming possible printing imperfections of a scanned reproduction of Half Mile Down, a volume by early 20th century naturalist and scientist William Beebe that documents deep-sea exploration. Baga has altered two key words from the original, changing each instance of “book” to “man,” and “it” to “her.” In Baga’s subtle revision, the human body and identity are linked to cultural artifact.
A 3-D video projection entitled Peacock Museum The Department of Education focuses in on peacocks as they eat seeds comprising portraits of Ellen DeGeneres and Rosie O’Donnell. In the same room, assorted ceramics are arranged on top of gray painted pedestals and spot lit, recalling strategies common to museological display. A faux documentary in the corner describes the extinction of Florida, suggesting that these objects – various parts of the human body, power tools, and effects of technology, amongst other things—are archaeological artifacts from the distant past.
MS Orlando expands on this narrative, further elaborating on the extinction of Florida and its aftermath. Gaming chairs outfitted with speakers emit diagetic and non-diagetic sound from various sources as a stream of footage—a synchronized dance in a mall, tourists in Times Square, multiple open windows on a computer monitor, peacocks advancing towards the camera, underwater activity, and Baga herself, dragging paint across the screen—layers one through the other, creating multiple transitioning narratives that conflate geography, time, and space. Also on view are five seed portraits, each one depicting a member of Baga’s immediate family, all at the age of 30 and in drag.
The works in this exhibition, Orlando (2015), by Trisha Baga, were created during the artist’s residency in Austin, Texas, for the exhibition Strange Pilgrims, organized by The Contemporary Austin and on view September 27, 2015 through January 24, 2016. The six-week residency was hosted jointly by The Contemporary Austin and the Visual Arts Center in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas at Austin. The exhibition also features the Texas premiere of Dream Displacement (1976) by Paul Sharits.
Trisha Baga lives and works in New York.