Tricia Middleton
11 November 2011 - 10 December 2011
Opening Reception 11 November 2011 8pm
Back Gallery:
The Call is Coming from Inside the House
Artist’s Talk: Saturday 12 November, 2 PM
The Call Is Coming from Inside the House is comprised of a series of text-based sign paintings (50 in total), to be presented within a functional workspace as thinkspace or constructed installation. This installation includes an elaborate workstation, unfinished works, the attendant runoff of this work, alongside a 70s faux baroque sofa covered in vintage bed sheets. The signs are casually mounted on the wall as though they were ideas still in the process of being organized. The signs convey various themes and ideas pertaining to philosophy or art criticism, all veering towards occasionally extreme positions in one form or another. The accumulation and juxtaposition of these ideas gradually come across as more unhinged and hopeless when taken in context with one another. When taken cumulatively and in sequence, these signs can be read as a disjointed painted archive featuring original writing, found language, quotes and misquotes. Certain references will be apparent to certain readers as direct quotes or detourned slightly towards new meanings, while much of the original text and blatant misquotes are presented through contemporary colloquial diction popularized by teenaged girls. The end result is the conflation of informal and colloquial voices mixed with material culled from monumental thinkers of highly determined thoughts including Engels, Nietzsche, Breton and Debord with highlights from Kant and Adorno. These signs project something that is highly dissimilar to the more familiar, professional and fit for the public voice that is usually presented around artwork or criticism.
Tricia Middleton holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and a Master of Fine Arts from Concordia University. Favouring the format of sculptural installation, her work is profoundly concerned with the materiality of the world, how materials are located in time, and how both their substance and their meaning changes within time. These installations, sculptures and videos will often use (and reuse) all of the materials of her studio, including its dust and debris. In this way, her experiments seek to hybridize historical and contemporary material culture, detailing the migrations of form and meaning over time. Her recent solo exhibitions include Dark Souls, at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (2009) and Midnight Gallery Rambles, at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (2009). Recent group exhibitions include Nothing to Declare: Recent Sculpture from Canada at the Power Plant in Toronto (2010), the inaugural Quebec Triennial at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal (2008) and De-con-structions, at the National Gallery of Canada (2007). Originally from Vancouver, Tricia Middleton lives and works in Montreal. Tricia Middleton is the 2010 winner of the Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award in the visual arts category.
