Tricia Middleton

Last updated
Tricia Middleton
Born1972
Vancouver, British Columbia
Education Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Concordia University
Known for sculptor, installation artist

Tricia Middleton (born 1972) is an installation artist based in Montreal, Quebec. [1] Middleton's artistic practice often involves the creation of elaborate, large-scale installations built out of a variety of materials including trash, wax, craft supplies, and other ephemera. She frequently re-purposes excess material from her studio practice in creating new installation and sculpture-based work. Her work has been collected by the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal.

Contents

Notable exhibitions

In 2009, Middleton exhibited a large installation at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, titled Dark Souls. [2] Taking its title from a novel by Nikolai Gogol, Dark Souls was designed to resemble a decaying bourgeois parlour and involved five connecting rooms, each filled with garbage and refuse, towering sculptures, and two video projections. [3]

In 2012, Middleton created a site-specific installation at the Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens. Titled Form is the Destroyer of Force, Without Severity There Can Be No Mercy, Middleton's installation, like Dark Souls, took found objects like shoes, vases, tea sets, and artificial roses and transformed them into uncanny assemblages covered in wax and glitter. The installation referenced the domestic architecture of the Oakville Galleries at Gairloch Gardens, turning the gallery into a fantastical home in decay. [4]

Middleton participated in a large-scale group exhibition titled Misled by Nature: Contemporary Art and the Baroque organized by the National Gallery of Canada, and exhibited at the Art Gallery of Alberta in Edmonton in 2013, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto in 2014. The exhibition, which featured other prominent Canadian and international artists including David Altmejd, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Sarah Sze, considered material excess and theatricality in recent installation art, [5] [6] and questioned the nature-culture divide. [7] Other notable group exhibitions include Nothing to Declare: Current Sculpture from Canada at The Power Plant in Toronto in 2009, [8] and the Quebec Triennial at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal in 2008. [9]

Middleton was represented by the now-closed Jessica Bradley Gallery in Toronto. There she exhibited small sculptures based on her prior large-scale installations at the commercial gallery, in an exhibition titled Tricia Middleton: Making Friends with Yourself (2015). [10] [11]

In 2023, Middleton published her first book, Obsidian Situations, in which "Parisian psychogeography unfolds through a practice of visionary mediumship drenched in melancholy and punctured by polemics. At once a singular transmission of eternal loss, a hilarious critique of the present, and a painstaking search among the ruins of rococo, this is writing with the ironic ring of truth."

Further reading

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Betty Goodwin</span> Canadian artist (1923–2008)

Betty Roodish Goodwin, was a multidisciplinary Canadian artist who expressed the complexity of human experience through her work.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal</span> Art museum in Quebec, Canada

The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal is a contemporary art museum in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is located on the Place des festivals in the Quartier des spectacles and is part of the Place des Arts complex.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Altmejd</span> Canadian sculptor (born 1974)

David Altmejd is a Canadian sculptor who lives and works in Los Angeles. He creates highly detailed sculptures that often blur the distinction between interior and exterior, surface and structure, the beautiful and grotesque, figurative representation and abstraction.

Mark Prent was a Canadian sculptor and performance artist that lived in the United States and was best known for the graphic realism of his figurative sculpture. Prent's sculptures have been described as disturbing and even brutal. His work was the subject of a 1972 lawsuit in which a gallery, exhibiting one of his works consisting of a butcher’s counter of human body parts, was charged with "exhibiting a disgusting object". Prent was the subject of the 1976 documentary "If Brains Were Dynamite [You Wouldn't Have Enough to Blow Your Nose] - Mark Prent".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Six (artist)</span> Canadian artist (born 1968)

David Armstrong VI is a Canadian artist, living and working in Montreal, Quebec. His work has been exhibited widely, including shows at White Columns (NY), The Power Plant (Toronto), Musée d'art Contemporain de Montréal, Kunsthal Nikolaj (Copenhagen), Night Gallery (LA), and the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa). He is represented by Bradley Ertaskirin in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Bill Vazan is a Canadian artist, known for land art, sculpture, painting and photography. His work has been exhibited in North America and internationally.

Alain Paiement is a Canadian artist. His work is mainly made from photography in form of installations, sculptures, and photomontage. His themes are related to geography, topography and architecture and mainly concerned by the construction of vision. A photo of the French artist Pierre Estable's apartment titled "Living Chaos" has been exhibited at the Galerie Clark from May 10 to June 17, 2001.

Shary Boyle is a contemporary Canadian visual artist working in the mediums of sculpture using the medium of ceramics, drawing, painting and performance art. She lives and works in Toronto.

Liz Magor is a Canadian visual artist based in Vancouver. She is well known for her sculptures that address themes of history, shelter and survival through objects that reference still life, domesticity and wildlife. She often re-purposes domestic objects such as blankets and is known for using mold making techniques.

Peter Krausz is a Romanian-born Canadian artist. Throughout his career, he worked within the fields of painting, drawing, installation, and photography and, since 1970, exhibited in museums and galleries across Canada, the United States, and Europe. He is best known for large-scale landscape paintings of the Mediterranean.

Valérie Blass is a Canadian artist working primarily in sculpture. She lives and works in her hometown of Montreal, Quebec, and is represented by Catriona Jeffries, in Vancouver. She received both her Bachelor of Fine Arts and Master of Fine Arts, specializing in visual and media arts, from the Université du Québec à Montréal. She employs a variety of sculptural techniques, including casting, carving, moulding, and bricolage to create strange and playful arrangements of both found and constructed objects.

Hajra Waheed is a Montréal-based artist. Her multimedia practice includes works on paper, collage, sound, video, sculpture and installation. Waheed uses news accounts, extensive research and personal histories to critically examine multiple issues including: covert power, mass surveillance, cultural distortion and the traumas of displacement caused by colonialism and mass migration.

Lyne Lapointe is a French-Canadian artist. Her work ranges from site-specific installations (1981–1995), found-objects, drawings, and paintings, with focuses on art history, museology, botany, and feminism. She has exhibited extensively in Montreal, Quebec, and New York City, New York, and across Canada. She now lives and works in Mansonville, Quebec.

Angela Grauerholz is a German-born Canadian photographer, graphic designer and educator living in Montreal.

Luanne Martineau is a contemporary, multimedia Canadian artist best known for her hand-spun and felted wool sculptures. Her work engages with social satire as well as feminist textile practice.

Isabelle Hayeur is a Canadian visual artist known for her photographs and experimental film. Hayeur's works are inspired by a critical analysis of ecology and urbanity. Since the late 1990s, Hayeur has created public art commissions, photography books, video installations, and has participated in many solo and group exhibitions. Her artworks can be found in both national and international collections, including those of the National Gallery of Canada, the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Art Gallery of Alberta (Edmonton), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, and the Fonds national d’art contemporain in Paris.

Barbara Steinman is a Canadian artist known for her work in video and installation art.

Francine Savard is a Canadian artist whose paintings and installations are grounded in the Plasticien tradition. Her practice explores relationships between language and visual art. Besides painting, Savard has a career as a graphic designer.

Ronald Benjamin Moppett is a Canadian painter. He is known primarily for abstract paintings and for works in which he combines paint and collage, along with non-traditional materials. Moppett is based in Calgary, Alberta.

Roland Poulin is a Canadian contemporary sculptor whose work is characterized by its horizontality and weightiness. He has lived in Sainte-Angèle-de-Monnoir, Quebec, since 1986.

References

  1. ↑ Baird, Daniel (25 Oct 2012). "Artist Tricia Middleton explores destruction and decay with her moody installation at Oakville's Gairloch Gardens". The Toronto Star. Retrieved 23 February 2014.
  2. ↑ "Tricia Middleton - 'Dark Souls' at MACM". Concordia University. Retrieved 23 February 2014.
  3. ↑ Simon, Cheryl. "Tricia Middleton". Canadian Art. Spring 2010: 120. Retrieved 23 February 2014.
  4. ↑ Baird, Daniel. "Artist Tricia Middleton explores destruction and decay with her moody installation at Oakville's Gairloch Gardens". The Toronto Star. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  5. ↑ "Misled by Nature: Contemporary Art and the Baroque". National Gallery of Canada. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  6. ↑ "Misled by Nature: Contemporary Art and the Baroque". Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art.
  7. ↑ Cooley, Alison. "Nature-Culture Dialogue Dominates MOCCA's Neo-Baroque Show". Canadian Art Online. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  8. ↑ "Nothing to Declare: Current Sculpture from Canada". The Power Plant. The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  9. ↑ "The Quebec Triennial 2008". Musee d'art Contemporain de Montreal. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  10. ↑ "Tricia Middleton: Making Friends with Yourself". Jessica Bradley Gallery. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
  11. ↑ Luo, Amy. "Tricia Middleton: A Troubling Beauty". Canadian Art Online. Canadian Art. Retrieved 8 March 2015.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.