Trisha Baga’s latest exhibition, “LOAF,” takes its name from a series of glazed ceramic slices of bread that reveal a colorful surface under each crust. They resemble marbled paper, photographs of interstellar nebula, or even nebula in the medical sense: a clouded spot on the cornea that causes blurry vision. The show is a generous display of two 3-D video installations, a sculpture of a cat’s play tower with various found objects, and thirty-odd ceramic sculptures arranged as if in a doctor’s waiting room.

Brother Making an Impressionist Painting (all works 2016) is a ceramic printer halfway through printing a blurry landscape. Thinking of Impressionism’s shift of focus from objective to subjective representation, one wonders how this might extend to contemporary mediated images. The face of Hillary Clinton on the cover of New York Magazine for There Is Nothing Simple About Hillary Clinton and of Nicki Minaj on Rolling Stone for Mad Genius Manic Diva are partly covered with ceramic reproductions of the same images, highlighting the obfuscation that was already present in the originals. But seeing is also personal: For Baga, Ellen DeGeneres is a brain-like shape.

In the 3-D video Ghosts, the artist revisits the moment when Alexander Graham Bell made the first ever telephone call and had no one to dial. The video portrays an anxiety with the spectacle of networked society collapsing into invisibility; live streaming to no audience, where screens are also smokescreens. The show becomes a tenderly frantic insistence on the materiality of the layers of mediation that surround us—a blurry vision made in glazed clay.

— Kristian Vistrup Madsen