Mixed Signals (two person exhibition with Scott Rogers)
TRUCK Gallery, Calgary AB
March 24th to April 20th, 2006
click images to enlarge, all photos: Tricia Middleton, 2006
exhibition press release:
Tricia Middleton's gathering of goods and services are mediators of the complicated spaces between the romantic notion of art objects holding auratic powers and the potential of creation in light of the penetrating and demystifying gaze of the camera. Disturbed by the idea of the reduction of art objects into the corpses of capitalism she suggests that they are more likely the undead, rotting and limp, unstable on this plane yet unable to crossover into a place for forgetting. It is this state of decay that is producing new organisms, bubbling and putrid, but active nonetheless and sentient perhaps. And so the slippages between the worlds begin and are mediated by her actions of gathering, assembling, erecting, repairing, reunifying, giving image to, and voice over. The resulting works are a sort of ectoplasm, the substance that emanates from a medium during a trance as evidence of a presence, of a connection. In this liminal state she builds for us impossible spaces that travel between these sites and offer homage to the potential for transformation. She uses the camera itself to examine her work in close up and slow-mo in hopes of some evidentiary moment of the experience of desire. as both the "patient and the camera person" she mixes her metaphors to suggest her intent, though the inverted "subject and surgeon" somehow seems to work on the same plane. Here subjectivity and the nonauratic melt together leaving a stain.
(the nineteenth century girl walks among us, a slip-synched presence.)
text: jake moore
click here for TRUCK Gallery website