COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Mia Middleton (b. 1988), titled, A Green Glass Eye, on view 9 February – 9 March, 2024. This is the artist’s second solo presentation with COMA and taking place at our Chippendale location, 2/27-39 Abercrombie Street, Chippendale, NSW 2008.
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 while animals encroach, 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 we humans have faced some of our 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.
