The mollusk is a lodestar in Baga’s work, a recurring metaphor and source of inspiration. The phylum “Mollusca” refers to common invertebrates such as snails, clams and oysters: soft-bodied organisms that secrete their own shells, the protective casings with which they move through the world. Baga considers these creatures to be nature’s ceramicists, and the analogy extends to all her work in clay: “the ceramics I think of as mollusk shells,” she has said, “or single-occupancy habitats.”

While making her 2018 video environment Mollusca and the Pelvic Floor, Baga jotted down the following phrase: “Mollusca is about self-colonization via technology.” The plot of the video—such as it is—involves Baga rechristening an Amazon Alexa “Mollusca,” teaching the virtual assistant to respond to a new name and dramatizing the strangeness of their interspecies rapport: the artist and her Alexa have conflict, fall in love, and eventually trade places. As Walker Art Center curator Pavel Pyś has written, “in her hands, boundaries between the organic and synthetic, as well as human, animal and machine are plied open: leaky viscera are reduced to series of ones and zeros and transformed back again. Where does the body end and the digital begin?” 

Ceramics are vessels, and several of Baga’s most elaborate works in clay perform an unusual function: portrait busts that serve as containers for working Amazon Alexas. A depressed Virgina Woolf smoking in the bathtub (as portrayed by Nicole Kidman in the movie The Hours) has an Alexa embedded in the side of her head, and a deftly rendered RuPaul houses another Alexa in her wig. Baga calls these brittle, fragmented bodies her “calcified casings for virtual assistants,” and their anthropomorphism pokes fun at the confidence we place in these non-human helpers. Designed to anticipate needs by converting our half-formed desires into digital purchases, Alexa is cast here as a modern-day oracle, ripe for reprogramming.

“A lot of the ceramics are artifacts of technologies that were built for image-making,” Baga has said. A vintage Cannon and an array of framed pictures appear slightly crumpled and blurred, as if succumbing to the downward pull of gravity that softens edges and muddies colors. The camera and photographs appear almost fossilized—like salvage from Pompeii, or a flooded basement—and offer a funny (if wistful) homage to a bygone era of analogue reproduction.

Baga views her self-taught pursuit of ceramics as “a break from the constraints of the pixel.” Working with clay is a necessary respite from the screen for this video artist and digital native: its tactility affords her a “connection to the real world, to physical materials and to other people.” 

A half-dozen poodles preside over the exhibition from a custom pedestal shaped like a ziggurat. Pet dogs—animals that have been molded to fit human needs—are a recurring theme in Baga’s ceramics. These sprout clay flames from their heads in a riff on Catholic "tongues of fire" imagery, linked to the day of the Pentecost when the Holy Spirit granted each Apostle the power to speak his own language and be understood.

Translatability is of keen interest to Baga, who is constantly crossing the wires of digital and manual production—injecting narrative into her physical objects and a palpable “handsy-ness” into her videos. The artist describes herself as  “an experimental adhesive maker”: leitmotifs drift across disciplinary bounds and sync up in surprising ways, melding into what Whitney Museum curator Elisabeth Sherman calls “a complex, cacophonous whole.”

Trisha Baga – the eye, the eye and the ear

Edited by Lucia Aspesi and Fiammetta Griccioli

Skira, 2020

Published in conjunction with her solo exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, this is the first monograph dedicated to Trisha Baga's genre-defying practice. The catalog takes the form of a sci-fi narrative and includes a visual essay detailing Baga's sprawling inspirations (edited by curator Herb Tam), as well as texts by artist Lucy Raven and curators Lucia Aspesi, Fiammetta Griccioli, Pavel Pyś, and Elisabeth Sherman.

Find more information on the catalog here.