Tricia Middleton
"Tricia Middleton" by Cheryl Simon, Spring 2010, p. 120
The title of Tricia Middleton’s installation at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is adapted from Nikolai Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. A dark satire about the moral decrepitude of Russian society in the early 19th century, Gogol’s story compares humanity’s worth with that of material things. The spiritually bankrupt behaviour and manners of Gogol’s characters are simply extensions of the world they inhabit. Easily adapted to allegorize the culture of late-stage capitalism, the novel offers a perfect parable for the habits and environments conjured in Middleton’s work. In Dark Souls, the artist’s take on the material dimension of contemporary life is built of stuff she collects second-hand and on the street. She assembles Styrofoam and cotton puffs, gaffer tape and cardboard, sparkle dust and candle wax into tenuous, suggestive forms. But if Middleton’s souls are dark, they are not dead yet; rather, they effervesce as they disintegrate and inspire as they fade away.
The artist’s typically candy-coloured arsenal of pink and sparkle dust has grown dustier and darker here; the accumulations are massive, the sculptures larger and more dramatically staged. The scale of the installation itself is monumental. Indeed, the work imagines an entire universe of debris in five linked rooms filled with towering sculptural works, junk hoards and two video projections (each with its own sound accompaniment), the elements woven together by visual and sound motifs that reflect on the paradoxical relationship of natural and cultural processes. Plastic flowers and foliage peek out of bricks and mortar, ribbons and wax bits turn branches into chandeliers. Nature is cultivated and culture naturalized.
Entering the installation through an opening in the gallery wall, the viewer arrives in a pseudo-bourgeois parlour awash in refuse. Garbage spills off the room’s pale-pink furniture, flooding along the wall to the door, and everything is covered in a thick layer of dust. The suggestion of a world caught in a process of transformation is amplified by the sounds of a forest stream (carried in from a video projection in the adjoining space).
Each corridor and wall in the installation has been worked as a canvas might be and each floor is covered, taped or painted over. The installation has been lit in such a way as to approximate a strange and shimmering landscape tableau. While rampantly anti-illusionist, each space nonetheless speaks to lived experience, none more so than the cavern that lies of the centre of the work. This space has lowered ceilings and blankets are strewn about on the floor. Middleton invites viewers to lie down in the museum to look at a video projection of stars, and many do. Lying down, looking up, one finds oneself dreaming of nature, contemplating the world of possibilities conjured by this work of art.
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