Mia Middleton: Conjurer of Cinematic Dreams on Canvas
Sarah Fensom
With Solo (2023), a modestly sized oil on cotton, Mia Middleton ushers the viewer into an intimate space. One of the opening paintings in “Love Story,” an exhibition of Middleton’s recen work mounted at Roberts Projects last Spring, Solo depicts a pair of legs from the shins down their dainty feet clad in a pair of red pumps. The artist renders the figure’s legs and the dar ground they occupy in grayscale—the legs in slate but slightly pinkened, like pale flesh seen through black nylons, and the ground in graphite brushed lightly with white, like a scuffed stage floor. The pumps, in dulled candy apple, sparkle faintly. The overall effect is blurred, reminiscent of a movie that’s been recorded off of television onto a tape.
The pumps are instantly recognizable as Dorothy’s ruby slippers, and they beckon to the viewe with their transportive power. But, really, they’re not Dorothy’s slippers as we know them. Thei toes are pointed, not rounded like the shoes Judy Garland wears in Victor Fleming’s The Wizard of Oz (1939), and they lack the dainty buckle of Judy’s pair, too (and they’re certainly not the magical silver shoes of L. Frank Baum’s original book). They’re much closer in design to the red heels Lulu (Laura Dern) clicks in Wild At Heart (1990), David Lynch’s tumultuous retelling of the tale. And though Middleton’s composition borrows the high angle framing of the most famou shot of the slippers in the 1939 film, the artist willfully mixes the achromatic drabness of Dorothy’s Kansas and the technicolor brilliance of the dreamland over the rainbow in one image. Middleton is bucking the all-important visual separation of the two discrete realms (the conscious and unconscious) in the cinematic adaptation, for which the slippers are the key.
In Middleton’s work, the veil between reality and fantasy, memory and hallucination, waking life and dreams is thinned. That the ruby slippers in Solo feel misremembered or inauthentic or whatever is exactly the point. The figurative paintings that comprise “Love Story” and the London-born, Lisbon-based artist’s oeuvre as a whole, function as signifiers, portals to sensation, recollection, and the subconscious. Every work features a single subject—typically an object or a physical gesture. The cushions of a plush brown couch, an extended hand holding a clipping of hair, a mug of black coffee: like the pumps, these subjects are both familia and strange. Have we seen them before or are they just dupes of the images that play on screen or in the back of our minds?
Recognition and misrecognition, Laura Mulvey writes in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” are layered on top of each other during Lacan’s Mirror Phase, when a child sees her own reflection for the first time. 1 This phase is central to the development of subjectivity, which we bring into our lives as viewers. This moment is, Mulvey says, “the birth of the long love affair/despair between image and self-image which has found such intensity of expression in film and such joyous recognition in the cinema audience.” Watching the cinematic image, we constantly lose and identify ourselves. Through painting, Middleton gives form to one of cinema’s most essential psychic phenomena, wherein we identify ourselves in what we notice, what we recognize, what we remember, and how.
Smoker (2023, oil on cotton) is another image-turned-memory, perhaps misremembered and recreated in the imagination. The painting glimpses a man’s face as he puffs on a stump of a cigarette, his eyes closed and chin lifted in ecstasy or fatigue. The whole image is bathed in crimson, like it’s being lit with gels. This work could represent the amalgamation of countless images from the films of Wong Kar-wai, in which Tony Leung languidly dangles a cigarette between his lips awash in red or green. Or it could be the misremembered face of a smoking leather boy from Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising, not quite the right angle or framing but unmistakably the same feeling. In the image’s difference—in its imperfectly recalled newness, now completely personal to the rememberer—is where the love that Middleton is suggesting lives.
This play between the recognized and misrecognized, the familiar and the strange is the site of meaning for Middleton. It’s an instinct that finds analogy in the work of Lynch and Maya Deren, artists who explore similar symbolic and subconscious terrain. In Lynch’s films, more traditiona action or dialogue scenes are very often intercut with shots that hold on a particular object—an ash tray full of cigarette butts, a ceiling fan whipping the air, a jacket lumped on the floor. Thes shots can seem like fetishistic aesthetic preoccupations. But given Lynch’s ongoing use of dreams as the settings of filmic action (made most explicit in Mulholland Drive (2001), in whic the first two-thirds of the film is a dream), objects become significant footholds for the unconscious. He’s showing how the little things we see in waking life become the inevitable set-dressing of our dream worlds—a jumping off point.
A Lynch-like red room is the setting of Middleton’s Key (2023, oil on cotton). In it, sits a chair with a silver key on its red leather seat. Though static, the key implies transition. In Mulholland Drive, a key unlocks a mysterious blue box, signifying the end of the prolonged dream sequence; in Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), the protagonist (Deren) repeatedly uses a key to unlock doors that lead into her own interior dream world. Behind each door in the film is a new illusory sequence wherein the protagonist encounters objects, gestures, a robed figure with a mirrored face, and multiples of herself.
Though Meshes defies conventional narrative, it follows a repetitive structure that included recurrent scenes of the protagonist falling asleep and awakening, thus delineating waking life and dreams. With Middleton’s paintings the dream frame is constantly alluded to but never explicitly represented. Instead, the moment of experience is direct, unmediated by narrative. Still when seen in series, her paintings just barely resist plot; though rendered through the static materiality of painting, they want to become a film. That her canvases skew small in scale (rarely bigger than 60 x 73 cm, and at times as tiny as 16 x 16 cm), and her palette is largely dark and muted, with grays, browns, greens, or reds often extending from edge to edge, suggests a strong resemblance to film frames. In an installation like “Love Story,” each painting essentially becomes a shot. With no prescribed chronology or linearity to the works, it is up to the viewer to run the images, familiar but unique, through the projector of her own mind.
Artaud believed that cinema’s flickering images had a deeply penetrative effect, writing: “this virtual power of the images probes for hitherto unused possibilities in the depth of the mind. Essentially the cinema reveals a whole occult life with which it puts us directly in contact.” Through her paintings, Middleton puts the viewer directly in contact with the images of cinema, the fragments, objects, and the illusive doors they unlock.