Tricia Middleton (born 1972) is an

installation art Installation art is an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called ...

ist based in

Montreal Montreal ( ; officially Montréal, ) is the second-most populous city in Canada and most populous city in the Canadian province of Quebec. Founded in 1642 as '' Ville-Marie'', or "City of Mary", it is named after Mount Royal, the triple ...

Quebec Quebec ( ; )According to the Canadian government, ''Québec'' (with the acute accent) is the official name in Canadian French and ''Quebec'' (without the accent) is the province's official name in Canadian English is one of the thirtee ...

. 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 The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (MACM) 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. Founded in 1964, it is ...

Notable Exhibitions

In 2009, Middleton exhibited a large installation at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montreal, titled ''Dark Souls''. Taking its title from a novel by Nikolai Gogol, ''Dark Souls'' was designed to resemble a decaying bourgeois

parlour A parlour (or parlor) is a reception room or public space. In medieval Christian Europe, the "outer parlour" was the room where the monks or nuns conducted business with those outside the monastery and the "inner parlour" was used for necessar ...

and involved five connecting rooms, each filled with garbage and refuse, towering sculptures, and two

video projection A video projector is an image projector that receives a video signal and projects the corresponding image on a projection screen using a lens system. Video projectors use a very bright ultra-high-performance lamp (a special mercury arc lamp), Xe ...

s. 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. Middleton participated in a large-scale group exhibition titled ''Misled by Nature: Contemporary Art and the Baroque'' organized by the

National Gallery of Canada The National Gallery of Canada (french: Musée des beaux-arts du Canada), located in the capital city of Ottawa, Ontario, is Canada's national art museum. The museum's building takes up , with of space used for exhibiting art. It is one of the ...

, and exhibited at the

Art Gallery of Alberta The Art Gallery of Alberta (AGA) is an art museum in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The museum occupies a building at Churchill Square in downtown Edmonton. The museum building was originally designed by Donald G. Bittorf, and B. James Wensley, alth ...

in Edmonton in 2013, and the

Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art The Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto Canada (MOCA), formerly known as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art (MOCCA), is a museum and art gallery in Toronto, Ontario. It is an independent, registered charitable organization. ...

in Toronto in 2014. The exhibition, which featured other prominent Canadian and international artists including

David Altmejd David Altmejd (born 1974) 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, figurative representation and abstra ...

Yinka Shonibare Yinka Shonibare (born 9 August 1962), is a British-Nigerian artist living in the United Kingdom. His work explores cultural identity, colonialism and post-colonialism within the contemporary context of globalisation. A hallmark of his art is t ...

MBE, and

Sarah Sze Sarah Sze (; born 1969) is an American artist widely recognized for challenging the boundaries of painting, installation, and architecture. Sze's sculptural practice ranges from slight gestures discovered in hidden spaces to expansive installat ...

, considered material excess and theatricality in recent installation art, and questioned the nature-culture divide. Other notable group exhibitions include ''Nothing to Declare: Current Sculpture from Canada'' at The Power Plant in Toronto in 2009, and the Quebec Triennial at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal in 2008. Represented by Jessica Bradley Gallery in Toronto, Middleton recently exhibited small sculptures based on her prior large-scale installations at the commercial gallery, in an exhibition titled ''Tricia Middleton: Making Friends with Yourself''.

References

External links

Tricia Middleton's Artist Page

Tricia Middleton's page at ISCP
{{DEFAULTSORT:Middleton, Tricia Living people Artists from Montreal Artists from Vancouver Concordia University alumni 1972 births Canadian installation artists Women installation artists Emily Carr University of Art and Design alumni 21st-century Canadian women artists

Notable Exhibitions

Further reading

References

External links