What is the obsidian situation? An act of mourning, committed in a mood of cocky abjection, against indifference and hollow repetition. The element is wet: fountains, sweat, vapours, wine, puddles, tears tears tears, soggy towels and the Seine flowing beneath. The form is layered, carefully folded, then crumpled and held together with an ancient ribbon. The structure is Paris, spiderweb of fixed names and stray histories. The obsidian I deadpans her way through the pathos of small-r-romance in a century that wishes it were dead. She has questions for her coterie of XVIIIe siècle spirits and other bric-à-brac. 

Q: Is it art to be day-drunk in the Tuileries? 

A: C’est possible. 

Q: Can anything be done for the avalanche of petits objets rushing to their fates, the fate of being vitrined in the heart of the Imperium; glass-eyed and soiled in a basement; the fate of a man’s missing teeth, a floating bottle? 

A: Tous, adorés et méprisés, suivront la rivière jusqu'à la mere.

Cynthia Mitchell

Tricia Middleton’s debut verse-novel brings the artist’s genius for summoning the psychic life of the object world to the page, here trading in the resonant material vocabulary that she has honed to perfection conjuring the wayward spirits of late-stage capitalism in sculptural form, for the equally resplendent wordplay of incisive observational poetry. 

Ostensibly set in present-day Paris, Obsidian Situations spans centuries, telling a story about the epigenetics of suffering, survival, and redemption in social and cultural form. Alternating between myriad personae—sometimes artist or artwork, poet or amorphous cloud—the anonymous, decidedly female, narrator that serves as our guide to the city of light channels the souls of works of art and ideas, of artists, philosophers, courtesans and, most heartrending of all, des Enfants-Trouvés through incantatory soliloquies that call to account the half-life of Enlightenment ideals propping up the soft and saggy moral economy of the L’age Anthropocentric. 

As a force of self-definition and a body objectified—and so subject to the same degradation as any and all things—our champion encounters ‘situations’ that are in equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, horrifying and wretched, breathtakingly beautiful, poignant, and mad. It’s a world of museums and collectors, artists and curators, lovers and mothers, daughters and others, charged with desire and repulsion, longing and rejection, death and devastation that, ironically, can only be transformed in art and in poetry and in dreams. 

Cheryl Simon

Author Biography

Tricia Middleton is an artist living and working in Montréal. Her work has been widely exhibited in monograph and group exhibitions in museums and galleries across Canada and abroad. Obsidian Situations is her first book.