Seeing Double
Katya Tylevich
In preparation for this exhibition, artist Mia Middleton paced in and out of her studio, excising paintings that did not conform to her strict internal logic. She was decisive about what stayed and went, having arrived at her aesthetic injunction somewhat intuitively, superstitiously… that is, without much logic at all. Like her process, the result is paradoxical: Double is a tightly edited sequence with elusive morals and no protagonist. Each painting’s formal confines are fixed—intransient—but the subject slippery.
Obsessively, the artist felled any towering hierarchy among her twenty-four oil-on-canvas paintings. They are of equal size (25cm x 30cm) and stripped of a leading figure. Yet, they form a cohesive unit beyond mere physical resemblance—beyond a complementary color palette, for example, or the signature precision of their brushstrokes, reoccurring symbols, and mysterious volumes (glassy red and aquamarine orbs; the crossing of limbs; passing bodies at the exact moment of intersection).
The works are a family in mood and—forgive me—aura. In their prevailing psychological states, they repeat increasingly familiar dysfunctions, withholdings, and pathologies. Individually, however, they encase secrets and private dilemmas unknown to one another.
As suggested by the series’s title—Double— themes of duality, evasion, intrigue, and equivocation indeed stalk the paintings. We viewers twist the works and their suggestions to inform one another, allowing sense and sanity to prevail. We suspect the artist of having left us cues and a roadmap to comprehension. Because the works appear to be representative (that is, we can safely recognize and name them), we confidently mend the areas where Middleton has removed the sinews and staples of narrative. Of course, my sense is not your sense. Control and impulse are both devils on a viewer’s shoulder. This is not that. Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
For Middleton, each work’s essence emerges with a viewer’s subjective interpretation. She calls the viewer’s experience a “co-creation,” a mutual faith in an artwork, but based on divergent certainties and associations. There is room in each painting for one’s solitary experience. Welcoming literalists and metaphor fiends alike, a painting’s significance multiplies and expands with exposure.
Where, then, does the artist find herself in this chemical reaction? She calls the process a “dissolution.” She means, perhaps, that her point of view and strict working conditions cease to exist as before, dissolving into a more universal, debauched reality. Moreso, the works initially arrive to us in chorus, with a purposeful arrangement, but will presumably break apart from each other in their ongoing lives, into the collections of different people and institutions, acquiring new and unexpected meanings in juxtaposition with previously unrelated works. This, too, is a dissolution. It is a breakdown of previous agreements and bonds.
Chance blows apart our interrogation of these formally meticulous and calculated paintings. This is no accident. This explosive device is planted in the works. Subversion #1, you may be seated.
Subversion #2, please rise. My previous allusion to René Magritte, though cute, was also intentional. Middleton’s works uphold some notable trademarks of Surrealism, nodding in particular to Magritte with fabric-wrapped faces (see: Thread), formal attire in uncanny contexts, and decidedly symbolic rain showers (see: Villain).
Whereas the Belgian surrealist wrapped Lovers in linens, however, Middleton unfurls human appendages in suggestions equal part sexual and morbid. Rift, alludes to la petite mort in every sense—noir-like hanky panky and/or the postmortem wrist of Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat. Content and aloof in their duplicity, the works shrug off such references and carry on.
For the viewer, hallucination and disorientation come from within. In this way, Middleton inverts the surrealist expression of the subconscious mind. On canvas, she presents order and sense. She strongly suggests chronology. The artist does not “melt” time, as would Dalí in his traipses across night terrors; instead, she preserves time with a clinical deadpan, capturing exact moments with an infuriating third-person objectivity. This is evidence, Kompromat, a P.I. witnessing intimate catastrophe from a distance. The relatively small, uniform size of each painting recalls a stack of analog photographs. In this way, the medium itself—the physical work—embodies the perceived theme, the feel, of disguise and conspiracy.
“I feel like I have to sneak up on the image,” says Middleton of her process. “I surprise myself with some of the choices I make.” Is this automatism? Is she describing the involuntary compulsion of making art? The artist claims it’s as physical as it is psychological. She speaks of “pouring” her body into those paintings she considers most successful. Her language is almost suicidal (“dissolution”). Instinct, reflexes and feeling drive the jump into a paradoxically considered, indifferent world. The thing itself — the work— betrays no Jackson Pollock convulsions around the canvas. It is technically rational, reserved in its demeanor, though internally ungovernable.
Passage is the first image that came to Middleton’s mind, forcing her hand to create this series. It encapsulates Double with its clipped, silent passage of bodies and moods, like shadows across asphalt. The later appearance of gloves, crossed in a similar expression (Cross) reinforces the heavy sensation of untraceable touch, of concealed human flesh at the moment of contact. This is as much the body language of a funeral as that of a silent wait in a bureaucratic queue. All but one of the paintings trap brevity—a shortness of time—within the presumed longevity of painting, particularly oil on canvas.
The outlier comes at the series’s end: Mirage. Again, the title suggests either an illusion or a delusion: something that isn’t there. As though raising a curtain to the series’s interior (a sort of autopsy), the work reveals an entirely different technique and emotion. Through a slow, highly detailed process of applying multiple thin layers to the canvas, with long stretches of waiting, Middleton gives great depth (literal, figurative) to the only image we cannot immediately identify. In contrast to the other works, which hold fleeting moments captive, Mirage dwells on time consumed, or all-consuming time, with no before or after. And the painting itself resembles the earth, a burial. The viewer who “pours” one’s body into this series, will break through the surface of cerebral and chronological meaning, beyond overtures of understanding, and land in something like Mirage... a conclusion of great depth, of incalculable time, beyond our grasp, beyond us.