For the exhibition, the artist is creating a new installation here in which she explores the question of the transformation and destruction of materials, a process characteristic of the industrial production cycle, the outcome of which is that “natural resources and the labouring being’s élan become denuded and erased.”
The title Dark Souls is inspired by that of the Nikolai Gogol novel Dead Souls, in which the author decried the decay of Russia’s social system. Middleton updates this critique with her denunciation of today’s consumer, and waste, society, which strips objects of their meaning and recognizes them only for their value as a form of currency.
Drawing on such architectural icons as the Palace of Versailles, and Notre-Dame Cathedral and the catacombs in Paris, Middleton uses painting, sculpture, video projections and recycled materials to create a phantasmagorical environment, a world of opulence and ruin, grand yet decadent, laid out along a series of Dantesque paths.