Stuart Middleton

Stuart Middleton works in drawing, painting, sculpture, text and animation. His practice continuously raises questions about human nature and systematic behaviour. By using storytelling as a research tool, he examines the themes of responsibility, capital, gender, class and cruelty. Middleton creates spaces where one is able to observe how fiction enters popular culture and provokes social division; how metaphors originate and impact the formation of one’s identity; how violence and aggression come to be institutionally normalised. His eccentric and odd sculptures feature twisted bodies; his installations take the shape of actual mazes; and his texts tell absurd scenarios placed in corporate settings. Middleton’s work is conceptual, surreal, frightening, humorous, and powerfully resistant to artistic conventional classification. ...

Founded in 2011, Carlos/Ishikawa’s program is dedicated to considered and ambitious exhibitions that offer diverse artists’ perspectives on structural, socio-cultural, and political questions. The program focuses on international artists with often wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary and experimental practices. There is an interest within the program of challenging the aesthetic conventions of conceptual art, and a focus on art that is able to operate on an affective, emotional level as well as a rigorous intellectual one. The gallery has offered many artists their first solo show, many of whom have gone on to receive recognition internationally. ...