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.
All in Relation
Mia Middleton
Written in 2025 to accompany my exhibition Double, All in Relation explores the proposition that relations are ontologically prior to the things they relate, and that meaning, selfhood, and reality emerge from those relations rather than existing independently of them.
As I move through life I increasingly experience temporal dilations. Flow states emerge more readily; that meditative feeling of an eternal present couched within a momentary wormhole, but the discontinuities go further than that. Childhood memories deliver messages from the distant past; glimmers of other lives leap into my eyes fully formed; my contemporary self sows the seeds of my childhood dreams. Just as consciousness might be described as a congealing of attention, episodic memory, fluid intelligence, imagination and other elusive phenomena, a chorus of images seem to arise through me, speaking in all directions across time. I often feel I am still everywhere I’ve ever been and beyond, and yet I am somewhere entirely new just the same.
My brain has always operated this way to a degree, like a series of slide projectors playing concurrently, but there's a deeper trans-temporality to it lately. The more I cultivate practices that lead me into my psyche—or perhaps more accurately, away from it— the more I’m struck by the effervescent impact of having a metacognitive dialogue with myself and by extension the world. It leads me to wonder: Is this blurring of my edges amplified as the bundle of my ‘selves’ accumulates over time, made more distinct by our particular modern turbulence? Or is this a kind of expanding radar-range, wherein the edges between subject and object dissolve when we finally let them? It’s a stretching of identity that I have been languishing in and has become the theme of my work over the last year.
In my exhibition ‘Double’, I step into this hall of mirrors. A shadow treads my footsteps, a spirit lives my dreams, a spy signals my secrets, an observer influences my actions, and I embody all of these entities and stories. Abandoning the notion that my skin and experience are the limit of myself, the dynamic manifold of life around me is not as distant as convention would have me believe. It’s a welcome sensation in a world where we often feel a loss of sensitivity to the threads that connect us beyond view. In a society where self-knowledge and self-actualisation are often heralded as our deepest governors, we tend to ignore the conduits between individual and collective, material and metaphysical. In this new body of work I set out to question the sharpness of a singular life, a penultimate time, a linear narrative. I explore the notion that the self is inherently dialogical, and is a reciprocal part of a whole that is in a constant state of emergence. A formal exploration of the topic needs to define many more terms than I’m able to do here, but I’d like to invite you into a journey through some of my working musings on selfhood and relationality.
One of the primary ambitions of my work is for the paintings to act as portals across self and time; to ignite recognition and transportation in the viewer. But if this exhibition is so driven by a flexing of boundaries between self and environment, how can I justify the function of my work as a passage into the self? In short, the self is my pathway to the whole. Theoretically, philosophers have long debated whether reality is unified or fragmented—whether it can be reduced to a single entity or is composed of many separations—and the divergent ontologies of Monism, Dualism and Pluralism embody that debate. But is it possible for multiple states to be true? Certain thinkers from Aristotle onwards have defended a notion of Holism that emphasizes an interconnected totality.
Metaphysical Holism views all parts of a system as related to the whole and the whole as having properties that the parts lack, meaning the whole cannot be fully understood solely by analyzing its parts.1 In certain distinctions such as Emergentism, the whole also has properties that communicate back with the parts, and generate novel structures within the system. The Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna outlines a dynamic interpretation of this in his Two Truths Doctrine, which proposes the existence of a fluid, ultimate reality that encompasses us. However, at everyday scale, vague and serviceable constructs like selfhood and language are essential for survival.2 Afterall, even our perceptual and cognitive apparatus can’t see the whole of anything in one view, even what sits directly before it. To Nāgārjuna, an awareness of our provisional truths logically implies a wider indefinable totality, but both are expressions of the same origin. It’s a notion that I find myself mirroring in my practice, whereby the limits of quotidian constructs leave inexplicable gaps and puzzles through which we might experience the supernormal.
Using a lattice of visual cues, I try to test the hypothesis that the very notion of the self provides the necessary lens for seeing beyond it. The stories and memories I store inside me connect and overlap with yours in heavily reduced fragments, and by isolating these fragments we experience connectivity, unification and shared ephemerality. In my attempt to engage with both the ubiquity and ethereality of these signifiers I have to step into a slippery, intuitive process of editing and aligning pictures in the hopes of inviting viewers into a realm of co-creation where self-image and world-building flex and converge. I’m not interested in trying to get at an objective reality, but rather find overlapping subjectivities through which we can realise ourselves and our world relationally, inconsistencies and all.
An engagement with the unconscious is a necessity here, and when I’m tip-toeing quietly around a painting I find myself drawing on methods like free association, dream analysis, active imagination and linguistic clues. These practices flow from the superstructures of psychoanalysis, all of which have disparate takes on the function of the self. A Lacanian might argue that the self is perpetually incomplete, divorced from reality and relegated to the world of the symbolic and the imaginary, whereas a Freudian would see it as a dynamic interplay between unconscious drives, conscious awareness, and societal constraints. A Jungian would position the self as a holistic, even transcendent entity that connects the individual with universal patterns, but a Gestalt theorist would counter the flattening of that view, seeing the self not as a static entity but an inherent process of relations with the environment.3 I situate myself in the latter end of the spectrum, whereby the dynamic boundary of the self can be a semi-permeable interface with the whole as in the Gestalt framework, but the symbolic fracturing observed by Lacan is our dominant experience. How can we access the fluidity of the material world through the self, rather than getting stuck in an auto-didactic fallacy of selfhood?
A recent conversation between cognitive scientist John Vervake and theologian Elizabeth Oldfield probes into this fissure to great effect. The two discuss wisdom and the divine from a holistic standpoint, pinpointing conditions for the reciprocal opening of the self to reality and lingering on a kind of indeterminate ‘really-realness’ that only an auditing of our self-narrativizing tendencies can afford us.4 So often, we are locked in our specific pattern predictions, and only by witnessing and challenging our cognitive machinery can we experience a kind of expansive clarity that might be equated with existential fullness. By making our perceptual apparatus more elastic we witness reality better, and the self and reality open reciprocally. But how do we enter into this fluid state? Oldfield rebrands some of the conservative language of religion, positing that the identification of values and sins can help us re-write our stories. In her view, we flourish as humans when we’re in touch with all aspects and impacts of our humanity, and faith is a doorway into that holistic and transcendent state.5
There’s a connection here to Vervaeke’s work in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. His research broadly identifies what he calls a “meaning crisis”, and in response he has identified two key questions that can lead us away from the ideological facades darkening the glass of the self, and towards a more clarifying experience: What do you want to exist without you? And what difference do you make to it now?.6 The paradox being that the determination of lasting meaning requires both the deepening and deprioritizing of the self. These questions feel salient in our phone-addicted moment, where a conditioned sequence of taps opens a video stream of influencers attempting to persuade us of capitalistic solutions to existential problems. Here, our selves are locked in a vicious regression of identity-optimisation and deployed into a marketplace of immediacy, with no chance of finding the clarity and intelligibility that Vervaeke and Oldfield are advocating for. When we outsource our agency, how can we experience reality?
In his famed dialectical materialist philosophy, Slavoj Žižek tackles this head on in his critiques of ideology and individuality, exploring the paradoxical limits of the self. He argues that the self is a product of ideology, caught in the illusion of freedom while being constrained by societal and cultural norms. His view, heavily informed by Lacanian and Hegelian theory, suggests that the self is an incoherent and alienated entity, co-constitutive with reality and emerging through the symbolic mediation of the unconscious and its interaction with external material conditions.7 This void within subject and object presupposes an ontological incompleteness which he uses to explain quantum indeterminacy—a scientific quandary about the nature of reality. Reasoning from his theory of ontological incompleteness, Žižek argues that reality is not only partially unknowable but also unfinished, providing a foundational justification for the impasse scientists encounter in quantum theory.8 As a Hegelian at heart, I find it a compelling argument for the existence of an emergent totality, but I don’t believe we’re relegated away from it as fundamentally as Žižek does. In fact there are a range of responses to quantum indeterminacy which might support a correlation between subjectivity and reality. Let’s take a quick detour through the quantum realm, although tangential, it’s worth the ride.
The core of the quantum issue is that the mathematical language of space-time in general relativity and the language of quantum mechanics do not communicate well, throwing our immutable physical laws - and therefore our empirical understanding of reality - into question. One potential reconciliation is to suppose that there is, in fact, a more foundational micro-structure beneath space-time. Theoretical physicists like Daniel Oriti theorize that quantum entanglement—a subtle relation between two quantum objects—could be the language we’re looking for. In his recent interview for the New Scientist, Oriti expands on this, laying the groundwork for a theory of quantum gravity that “challenges the idea of a separation between the ‘world’ and ‘us’”.9 If reality is relations between quantum objects unbound by space and time, it arises dependently, and the boundaries between reality and the models we construct to define it fall away. Rather than there being an objective world that is independent of us, we impact even the most foundational tenets of reality by merely existing in relation with it. The notion challenges our conventional understanding of the real, and implicates our actions, morals and ethics in new ways. It also echoes findings in other dynamic systems across disciplines; the constructs of subjective parts and objective wholes are inherently intertwined within a complex web of interdependencies.
I could go on and on about dynamic systems that can be observed in other fields (assemblage theory, differential geometry, autopoiesis to name a few of particular interest), but I'll return to my own experience and processing. I recently had a stint of therapy that felt markedly different to any treatment I had sought before. I worked with a psychoanalyst specialising in Systemic Therapy to identify my ego states and treat myself as a collection of sub-personalities that broadly typify different patterns of thinking.10 Crucially, these components are borne of, and maintained by, my physical reality (places, relationships etc), and they exist in relational flux with each other. One of the tasks of Systemic Therapy is to ameliorate the conflict between those parts so that we can minimize our self deceptions and see more deeply into reality. By clearing the window of the self, we can better embody the world and its dynamism. Perhaps it’s because I’m so hardwired to plumb the depths, but I found the IFS experience deeply impactful due to its personal and explorative nature. My analyst and I were finding my novel language and pathway together in a non-pathologizing way. I’ve often found that for my particular way of seeing and thinking, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy can be too schematic and outcome oriented, like being dropped into a grid of predetermined pathways and then filtered through them and out the bottom. Unsurprisingly, I preferred the relational journey my analyst and I co-constructed.
This reflexive process of exploration is something I like to tease out in my work, given there is a foundational relationality that exists in the experience of viewing artwork. In the context of an exhibition, we arrive in an enclosed space without knowing the why or the how of the situation before us. There’s a voyeuristic frisson that comes with witnessing an intimate selection of creations in a public setting, where we’re able to reflect on our broader context, morals, memories and beliefs more acutely. As such, it’s possible to think of this as an interchange that induces cognitive flexibility and softens the border between subject and object. The suspended, semiotic series that comprise ‘Double’ attempt to amplify that logic and trigger new narratives and mysteries. Each series aims to be lyrical yet diverse, otherwise we’re lulled into a design system rather than animated by resolving discordance. Inside this animated state I hope to set off a trip-wire where the mind fuses memory with imagination to reconcile the scene. It’s a cognitive experiment of sorts into the blending of personal and collective towards what some thinkers are now calling transjectivity.4
One of the most exciting parts of my job is the work of synthesising and translating information into new iterations; continuities between disparate phenomena flow into the work from all directions. I suppose in the context of my own practice I am patient zero, but rather than focusing on self-expression in the conventional sense, I try to position myself as a vessel for confluent parts, qualities and relations. My inability to do so completely is expected; the ineffability that snakes in has to have something to speak to. As such, I’m not claiming to have emptied myself from the work to allow grander forces to move through me, or to have masterminded some sort of novel integrative system; those would be egoic claims in my view. Rather, I try to find the outline of an object inside myself and speak to it, to you, so that you might speak back.
As I sit here writing, I’m reminded of the impact my personal history has on all of this. As the daughter of international school teachers, I grew up moving between countries and never lingering on one continent for more than a few years. It’s a kind of nomadism that many people identify with these days, and for all of its horizon expansion comes the requisite identity distortion. When I was unpacking ego states with my beloved analyst, we realised that they tended to be place-specific, such was the splintering nature of being uprooted across cultures, coupled with seeing it all from a compounding distance. My upbringing was in many ways the starting point for my engagement with parts and wholes - should I view it as fragmentary or unifying? From where I stand now it seems to be both. As holism contends, reframing the self as a flexible interface with an evolving totality makes space for all of the contradictions and contingencies of the material world.
By embracing the porous boundaries of selfhood, we open pathways to an embodied relational understanding of reality at a grand scale. As Heidegger would put it, our task becomes being in relation to the world, rather than becoming too ensnared in the constraints of the models we construct to define it. This perspective-dependency where epistemology and empiricism combine forces a more participatory understanding of what is real.11 The further I scurry down this rabbit hole, the more I witness a deflation of the sharp edges between disciplines, individuals, generations and organizational models, and something transportative happens. I can let down my load a little and step into a correlative unfolding of selfhood and reality. By embracing their interpolation, a strange and ecstatic form of recognition arises, and I can travel across time all I like.
- Audi, Robert. “The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy”, 3rd ed., Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 2015
- Higgins, Kathleen, et al. “Fragments and Reality” IAI, 9 Apr. 2024, iai.tv/video/fragments-and-reality.
- Stadler, Michael. “The Ontological Nature of Part-Whole Oscillations: An Interdisciplinary Determination” Vienna, Austria, Austrian Science Fund, Jul. 2020
- Vervaeke, John & Oldfield, Elizabeth. “Exploring the Connection Between Wisdom, Love, and the Really Real”, 3 May, 2024, https://youtu.be/GDPBQBOXLi4?si=Y6PWmuW-TQzy4OXK
- Oldfield, Elizabeth. “Fully Alive Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times”, Hachette UK, Brazos Press, 2024
- Vervaeke, John. “Dialectic into Dialogos and the Pragmatics of No-thingness in a Time of Crisis”, Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture, Vol. 5, 2 (2021): 58-75. 10.14394/eidos.jpc.2021.0017
- Carew, Joseph. “Ontological Catastrophe: Žižek and the Paradoxical Metaphysics of German Idealism”, Michigan, US, Michigan Publishing, Oct. 29 2014
- Zizek, Slavoj. “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, Verso, London, UK, 2012
- Oriti, Daniele. “How You Create Reality”, New Scientist, 12 Oct. 2024, pp. 40-43
- Schwartz, Richard. “Introduction to Internal Family Systems”, Colorado, USA, Sounds True, 2023
- McGilchrist, Iain. “The Matter with Things”, London, UK, Perspectiva, Nov. 9 2021
A Green Glass Eye
Mia Middleton
As though slipping in and out of a trance, A Green Glass Eye begins in the shadows of phantasmagoria and the arcane, exploring the verge between the observable and the unexplained. In this aqueous world, human life is interstitial. Sight is obscured, forms are suspended as though possessed, pearls glimmer like sirens, light swims on the edge of alchemy.
Outside the little lighthouses of our eyes is a field of vision that exists only when sight is abandoned entirely. Intuitive, primordial ways of seeing and being that depend on surrender and humility. In this peripheral lens, identity and history converge, preferring to flicker in the corners of view unobserved. Yet it is to this spiritual plane that we find ourselves returning again and again, searching for ghosts of guidance and mining the sacred for treasures.
These paintings began at the sea, at the confluence of depths and shallows where humanity has faced some of its most adverse challenges. Over time, it is the hubris of the hunt and the porosity of the landscape that took precedence in the works, the images becoming conduits for somnolent shifts in power and perception. Casting back in time to whalers plumbing the deep or diviners conjuring the unseen, it is clear that to 'marvel' and to 'trap' are one and the same at the apex of discovery and opportunity. Next to the mirror we find a hook, next to the foot we find a pearl.
As long as humans have gathered on the earth, we have spun vernacular histories and mythical postulations around our tangible world, knowing innately that there is a deeper experience lurking in the conflation of self and other, of man and beast. Our historic fascination with the supernatural has long helped us bridge that gap. The saga of magic is a tangled passage of observation in which subjectivity is obscured and material contortions unfurl in full view. In the theater of illusions, uncertainty is impenitently simple. There is a flicker between smoke and mirror where we catch a glimpse of the eye of the monster, and together we bring each other into being.
The Mermaid (from The Sea Cabinet)
By Caitríona O'Reilly
Between the imaginary iceberg and the skeletal whale
is the stuffed and mounted mermaid in her case,
the crudely-stitched seam between skin and scale
so unlike Herbert Draper’s siren dreams, loose
on the swelling tide, part virgin and part harpy.
Her post-mortem hair and her terrible face
look more like P.T. Barnum’s Freak of Feejee,
piscene and wordless, trapped in the net of a stare.
She has the head and shrivelled tits of a monkey,
the green glass eyes of a porcelain doll, a pair
of praying-mantis hands, and fishy lips
open to reveal her sea-caved mouth, her rare
ivory mermaid-teeth. Children breathe and rap
on the glass to make her move. In her fixity
she’s as far as can be from the selkie who slips
her wet pelt on the beaches of Orkney
and walks as a woman, pupils widened in light,
discarding the stuffed sack of her body.
Without hearing, or touch, or taste, or smell, or sight
she echoes the numb roll of the whale
in a sea congealed with cold, when it was thought
no beast could be as nerveless as the whale.
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.
Love Story
Mia Middleton
Lately I have been thinking about the body, about our physical and emotional bounds, and the thresholds we breach, transcend and transform over our lives. As with all of my work, the elusive language of the body and the psyche are woven together with the immensity of life beyond our sensory perception or logical reasoning. I think of my paintings as pin pricks of information alluding to a larger whole that we can only guess at.
Dualities are a constant fascination of mine. For this exhibition, captivity and release take center stage. In ways it feels that we oscillate between the necessities of possessiveness and openness in every part of life. We expand our threshold for growth and experience by making deep commitments to values, people, futures, and yet simultaneously, life and self are constantly evolving, we cannot hold onto things forever for fear of loss and unknowns. There is a balancing act in there that no manual can help with, even intuition can get it wrong. It seems we are destined to trip up in this dance, and that is part of the whole performance.
In a world where ideals and absolutes are delivered to us daily through devices we barely control, what does it look like to surrender to imperfection, embrace discordance and ephemerality; center our animal experience once again. There is certainly much discomfort there. In Love Story I am evoking a scene that takes place in a remote setting. The figures there are poised for pleasure or pain, movement or stasis. It’s hard to determine. Domesticity mingles with wildness, simplicity with complexity, and the body sits in the balance.
A love story is a potent ideal. We look for an answer to ourselves, something through which we ascend - or escape - our physical bounds. Yet despite this hopeful belief, we know that purity can shatter, giving way to less transcendent feelings. It seems clear to me that there is little difference between reality and fantasy, memory and imagination, and a story can evolve in meaning continually over time. Using the body as the container for this mutability, Love Story is a place where a gesture, a stance, a look, a possession, become the whole world, if just for a moment, before shifting again.