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November 28, 2009 through to January 17, 2010 TRICIA MIDDLETON: Midnight Gallery Rambles |
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Opening Reception: Saturday, November 28 at 8 PM  Portal to future contemporary art wing, featuring view of as yet uncollected art works, 2007, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON 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 spectre 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. The artist eviscerates the sterile walls of the gallery 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, reorganisation, redistribution, recontextualisation and reinterpretation."1 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), SKOL and Galerie Clark (Montréal). Group exhibitions include Mixed Signals, TRUCK (Calgary), Dé-con-structions, National Gallery of Canada, and the Quebec Triennial, Musee d’art contemporain de Montréal. Originally from Vancouver, BC, Tricia Middleton lives and works in Montréal. 1. Jacob Lillemose. Conceptual Transformation of Art: From Dematerialisation of the Object to Immateriality in Networks. In Joasia Krysa, editor, Curating Immateriality, DATA browser 03, pages 113–135. Autonomedia, 2006. URL http://www.data-browser.net 2. Understanding Derrida. Edited by Jack Reynolds and Jonathan Roffe. New York — London, Continuum, 2004. p.85. Organized by the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and curated by Ryan Doherty. Funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the City of Lethbridge. |
