Trisha Baga’s dense Imaginary is investigated in her solo show at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca.

If the Imaginary is intended as “the sphere of imagination”, so this term is connected to a certain collective imaginary that identifies itself into traditional and common values. Imaginary is then a mirror for the community, whereas, on the contrary, the Imaginary has to be created. It is capable to carry the meaning of “images creator”.

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“This is a reproduction of a man published before 1923”. This sentence is not taken from Virginia Woolf’s novel: this “Orlando” in fact is a work by Trisha Baga (Venice, Florida, 1985), and it is going to welcome you at her great solo show at Pirelli Hangar Bicocca in Milano. The extract is seized by Half Mile Down’s preface, a book written by scientist and naturalist William Beebe in 1926. Of course, to be “published before 1923” it wasn’t a man, but a book. Baga replaced the two words and she changed the meaning of the message.  Through this opening work of art that starts the path of her first big institutional solo exhibition in Italy, Baga is clearing up some of her rules – or anti-rules – and she disseminated Hangar Bicocca’s space with messy, dense and stratified installations based on practical actions and conceptual reactions. 

Trisha Baga’s work is based on the imaginary value of the artist, that is almost compulsively investigated through different kind of mediums: ironical movie or television narrations, paintings, sculptures, photos, sounds, archive’s material, readymade objects, found ones, performances, 3D projections (the first ones were born in a very fascinating and artisanal way) – to create a multisensory environment. So, the public have to connect and, then, visually combine one piece to the other, by understanding its playful, social and often politically cynical meanings. If the Orlando piece – shown for the first time in 2015 at Greene Naftali gallery in New York – is a welcome at the beginning of the exhibition, the other fragments of the installation path could be just more and more intense.

The show’s display hints at the aesthetics commonly found in natural history museums, not only in its style of presentation but also by using an unusual classification system that intertwines the idea of the fossil with high-tech devices such as today’s virtual personal assistants, thus creating a sort of temporal short-circuit. There also are 30 sculptures made by Trisha in 2015, that portrayed various characters from Ru Paul to weird tiny sphinx-dogs. In “the eye, the eye and the ear” irony represents a leitmotiv. Baga is capable to test the audience by melting together Pablo Picasso and Sex and City, to share nowadays topics but always by keeping an eye on the past. Casualty and intentionality are both linked and needed. Tales and subjects are picked by the curators Aspesi and Griccioli at Hangar through Trisha Baga’s iconic titles such as There is no “I” in Trisha (2005-2007/2020), 1620 (2020), made specifically for the show, or the series Seed Paintings (2017). We will need to sharpen our senses and open two eyes and an ear.

Cover image: Trisha Baga, The eye the eye the ear. Courtesy Pirelli Hangar Bicocca.

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