Tricia Middleton, Midnight Gallery Rambles, installation view, photo by David M. C. Miller and Petra Mala Miller
MIDNIGHT GALLERY RAMBLES | TRICIA MIDDLETON
11.28.2009 | 01.17.2010
There are phantoms at play in Tricia Middleton’s exhibition Midnight Gallery Rambles. Late-night recordings reveal a mysterious apparition hard at work renovating an architectural installation and using “building” materials such as rickety scaffolding on the brink of collapse and sculptural paintings doubling as tarps in the process. Lurking among the drywall compound, silicone, tape, string, dust and glitter that is scattered, strewn and slathered throughout the gallery, Middleton’s specter pushes the material form and structural conventions of the gallery beyond rational order and human control into something extreme, unexpected and absurd.
A wry, enigmatic and eerie look at processes of construction, destruction and transformation, Midnight Gallery Rambles gently undermines the certainty of a material experience by day with a comically disembodied performance by night eviscerating the sterile walls and exposing a gritty, fantastic underbelly. Middleton calls to mind the fetishization of labour, art-making and the mystical role of the artist (as spiritual medium), while offering the possibility of the self-determination of objects, or more specifically the residue or “ectoplasmic” trace of an object’s dematerialization.
In setting materiality free from the object - and the philosophical discourse, power structures and aesthetic paradigm of pure visuality and media-specificity surrounding it - the notion allows us to comprehend materiality as a potential predisposed for continuous conceptual recoding, reorganization, redistribution, recontextualisation and reinterpretation.
Middleton’s balance between the tangible and the ethereal may also conjure up Artaud’s notion of the “subjectile,” which like canvas, paper or film, can take the place of the subject or the object while being neither one or the other. A ghostly vestige, “The subjectile belongs to the order of that which leaves its mark in having retreated from the scene of what it makes appear.”2 Middleton investigates this liminal device through elements such as her blankets which function as tarps designed to catch the drips and spills, yet are so encrusted in paint, plaster and other materials that they slip easily into becoming the very objects they were designed to protect. Like phantoms, Middleton’s work vacillates between visible and invisible, subject and object, form and function and in doing so opens up a vast space of possibility.
Tricia Middleton holds a BFA from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (1997) and an MFA from Concordia University (2005). Middleton’s work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Third Space Gallery (St John NB), SKOL and Galerie Clark (Montréal QC). Group exhibitions include Mixed Signals, TRUCK (Calgary AB), Dé-con-structions, National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa ON), and the Quebec Triennial, Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal (Montreal, QC). Originally from Vancouver, BC, Tricia Middleton lives and works in Montréal, QC.
