Chase Middleton (b.1989, Australia) received her MFA from the Yale school of Art in 2019 and her BFA from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 2012. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Red Hook Labs in New York; Base in Milano; and the National Portrait Gallery in Australia. She currently lives and works in New York City.
Chase’s images are confusing in a confidential way, an approach she also uses to dialogue directly with the actor of her images, creating tension through a perfect balance of strangeness and intrigue. Her style can be defined as surreal in their execution, highlighting a sort of peaceful absurdity that permeates the scene.
About ‘Nostalgia for the Mud’– words by Chase Middleton:
The images in this body of work compose a disparate range of subjects: ritualistic gatherings, encounters with strangers, hallucinatory artifice and the heightened drama of myth in the domestic uncanny. I use photography as a vehicle to enter into an unsettling world where it is uncertain whether one is viewing a glimpse of an imagined afterlife, alternate reality, or if it is the simple recording of everyday banality. My work questions what it means to see something you’re not supposed to see and what happens when that becomes your obsession.
