Trisha Baga, The Story of Painting, 2012,
3-D video slide show (with 3-D glasses), color, sound, 19 minutes 1 second; acrylic-on-canvas painting, computer speaker, lamp, painted bottles, painted foam, dimensions variable.

I once considered Trisha Baga a video artist, but the appellation doesn’t really fit any longer. Increasingly over the past two years, Baga has allowed the objects that have always accumulated around her projections—which she composes from off-the-cuff footage, pop-culture samplings, and fleet Final Cut edits—to enter the rarefied space of the moving image. Such dispersion plays a large role in her most recent works. Intervening mirrors, water bottles, and bits of foam, all part of an extended engagement with notions of medium and objecthood, further enables, at the risk of belaboring, her pleasingly human inquiry into everyday interactions with media, art, and the world outside.

For her recent show at Greene Naftali, Baga exhibited work that inflects her precisely scattered video installations with traditional fare: painting and sculpture. Bag’s Circle (all works 2012) features video projected across a sprawling installation of objects; a painting, hung in the light of the projector, seems to rest on the shadow cast by a painted Styrofoam sculpture propped on a TV tray table. This mingling of static object and indexical trace grounds the viewer in Baga’s exploration of video even as she’s debasing it, invoking 1960s experimental film and performance along the way (the refined irreverence of Rachel Harrison also comes to mind). That there are more canvases than videos on view is acknowledged by The Story of Painting. The work features the voice of Sister Wendy, cult art historian and Carmelite-approved hermit, pontificating on Las Meninas, van Gogh, and Giverny, France, as painterly marks rotate on and past abstract canvases. Conflating grand-artist myths and buoyant digital mark-making, Baga’s medium inquisitiveness makes for an amenable pairing with her more narratively inclined works.

In a similar spirit, Plymouth Rock 2 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (in a presentation organized by Elisabeth Sherman that coincided with the Greene Naftali show) riffs on the phony patriotic emblem and its dubious objecthood. Two projectors, placed one in front of the other, produce the work’s most tangible image of technological interface: an active window in front of an ignored one. Various objects, including small sculptural abstractions, a picture frame containing a photo of Britney Spears, and a boom box (whose shadow becomes a stand-in for the titular boulder), occlude the path of the two projections. Yet the separation between viewer and artwork is at its greatest here. Institutional confines can stifle free-form material exploration, but Baga appears to be aware of the matter: A blank white rectangle in the video reveals the museum’s surveillance camera, and a third of the way into the piece, an embedded shadow “walks” in front of the projectors (and out of the gallery) in an act of museumgoer mimesis.

Previously, semitransparent layers in Baga’s videos created a sense of the quotidian shuffling of images. Now, with consumer-grade 3-D technology, visual complexity reaches surprising, generative extremes. In Hercules at Greene Naftali, the effect of a constantly shifting depth of field is, at times, baffling. The video combines original footage shot in 3-D, stills, and appropriated clips that Baga has rendered in three dimensions (the majority of which are from the 2012 Olympics). A visually crisp clip taken from a promotional IMAX countdown announces “Crystal Clear Images.” Harshly superimposed, hokey GIF animations occasionally appear throughout the video, jolting the spellbound viewer and underscoring the oddity of such clarity in an otherwise haphazard setting.

The life cycle and behavior of an image, both moving and still, is examined in the Greene Naftali exhibition’s most concise and ingenious work, Studio Photographs 2012. A small piece of foam gessoed with glow-in-the-dark paint serves as the screen upon which Baga projects footage of her darkened studio. Suddenly, a flashlight flips on, revealing her dog wrestling with a piece of plastic. Then it shuts off—yet a hazy, green afterimage remains. A work in progress is then projected within the nocturnal picture of her crowded studio, sluggishly creeping around the screen, leaving a path of effulgent slime. Limning the lag between production and reception, presentation and perception, Baga suggests that images, artworks, and events may fade in memory, but the most effective tend to leave some residue behind.

—Beau Rutland