Mia Middleton: Three Secrets

Secrets are dichotomous: defiant in action and deferential in concealment. There’s both conflict and harmony in that duality, and in this case there’s bliss, dissent, agency, misery and entropy inside the secrets themselves. Within the cognitive dissonance of secrecy is a mode of surrender to the social structures that keep us afloat – morality, family, security, chronology – and simultaneously an acknowledgement of their modesty and fragility. Fear keeps a secret, but so does love. Courage sets it free, but so does pain.

As a mirror for secrecy, the paintings in Three Secrets are fractured and anomalous, unable to reveal themselves completely. Absence is as loud as presence. Something stays still, waiting, locked out of complete view and in its partial visibility there is an invitation for extrapolation and evocation. The paintings are ciphers for the things they obscure, fragmented traces of yearning and release.

"Yet Middleton’s work is far from realist. Her paintings’ monochromatic backgrounds locate her subjects in the cloistered-off realm of the artist’s imagination, if anywhere at all."

Codified across the gallery in partial association with each other, the works imply the seduction of narrative fullness without delivering it. In both form and function, desire for something out of reach becomes the framework for these images. Lacan & Hegel propose that desire relies on lack to exist. The raison d’être of desire is not to attain its object, but to keep it distant in order to perpetuate itself. Secret things – being inherently restricted – are often vehicles for desire. 

Unknowns are both alluring and unnerving. Time dilates, the mind cycles, earth becomes amorphous, unstable, ethereal. These paintings occupy a tenuous threshold that separates the physical from the ephemeral. They are relics of something lost and objects of continual desire. Moments of potential and paralysis. Traces of a story and projections of a fantasy.