Rewind: Tricia Middleton
Centre des Arts Actuels SKOL, Montreal
The Woods by Tricia Middleton is an installation of oil painting, assemblage, video and architectural constructions, deconstructions and reconstructions. The woods of the title have their etymological and ideological genesis in phenomenology and literary sources. While the materiality of Middleton's practice is unmistakable, her title also intimates a haunted place that harbours the unknown, and the exhibition is suffused with a conflation of the two.
The double doors of SKOL open onto a clean, white facade that gives way to a blind-cornered corridor; at its bend is a painting that fills the wall from floor to ceiling. Its lunar surface, cool blue and cratered, exerts a magnetic pull that channels you through to the gallery proper. Your passage, however, is not unencumbered; the space is fraught with interruptions. The clean drywalled surfaces give way to cardboard and insulating foam cobbled together with an excess of plaster and holes stuffed with dyed cotton puffs and sparkles. These curious materials, so physical and oddly cute, would seem the antithesis of the luminous, toothpaste-blue surface of the painting. Or perhaps not: odd bits of lint and dust are part of the painting and seem to be holding its layers of pigment together. The impossibility of a perfect surface allows us access.
Once through the corridor, we see its framework anew as an elaborate stage set providing background and support for another series of works. Housed in a corner and piled high up the gallery wall are tumbledown structures made of dowels and tape, cardboard and glue, unlit and seemingly abandoned. Nestled within is a small, richly coloured video projection, the subject of which is the collection of objects that surrounds it—but in the video, the assemblages are intact. The camera pores over them in careful consideration of the minutiae of each construction, at times reducing the complex objects within the frame to halos of colour. Is this aura made evident by the mediating eye of the camera or a simple perceptual trick?
While phenomenology and other philosophical systems have afforded that matter is sentient, it was Einstein who bolstered this belief by famously proving that very small amounts of mass equate to great amounts of energy. In The Woods, Middleton reanimates this thinking. She demonstrates the artist's role as a medium between tangible materials and the expression of energy. Haunting.
Summer 2005
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