Roberts Projects is delighted to present Summoning Cleo, an exhibition of new work by Mia Middleton, the artist’s second solo presentation with the gallery. Building on earlier bodies of work that examined the unexpected and often oblique meanings latent within familiar scenes, these new paintings recast recognizable forms as surreal archetypes, dramatizing the interplay between presence and absence, and between the literal and the metaphorical. Combining intimate, intensely concentrated paintings with works made at a new and expanded scale, Middleton uses a shifting palette of theatrical reds and archival greys to articulate two thematic registers: the vitality of life and the systems that contain it. The paintings sustain the tension between these forces, allowing a quiet transmutation to emerge. In doing so, Summoning Cleo pushes the narrative structure to its limits, revealing how meaning persists even as coherence begins to fracture.

Middleton’s visual language of cropped perspectives, isolated objects and suspended gestures draws on late-19th-century theatrical imagery and the early language of photography, often through anonymous vintage photographs discovered in markets, whose obscurity endures even through their reframing. Inspired by a pre-modern sensibility of embodied presence before the camera, Middleton’s compositions coalesce into an uncanny, almost dystopian play where context remains mysterious, and each figure seems both fixed in a moment and able to transcend time. By keeping figures anonymous and details fragmented, Middleton constructs phantasmagoric scenes that normalize distortion and ambiguity in place of logic and rationality.

An atmosphere of anticipation runs throughout Summoning Cleo, as subjects both isolated and in groups appear in states of suspension or interruption. Middleton uses a myriad of gestures—an arched foot, covered face or crossed legs—to invoke a theatrical relationship to form and space, freezing duration within a single moment. There is a figure at the center of the work who never appears. Cleo is not depicted but summoned—a centrifugal force whose presence evokes what cannot be held: the raw force of life caught within the conditions of modern survival. What remains is the memory and essence of a being that resists representation, exceeding the limits of the image itself. Though partial and obscure, specific characters and settings appear throughout the exhibition: a shadowed, faceless figure wearing a wide-brimmed hat; a man whose eye has been replaced by a coin; a woman engulfed by ethereal light; a factory-castle embedded in a romantic landscape; spotlit stage curtains on the verge of opening or closing. In each painting, Middleton cultivates a multiplicity of meanings through omission, withholding details that might otherwise define or stabilize a narrative context.

In showing figures from behind and at a distance, or those who remain unaware of our gaze, Middleton invokes the contemporary systems of observation and surveillance that condition individual and collective behavior alike. The tension that results from the collision between unsuspecting subjects and techniques used to control them produces a register of existential angst throughout the exhibition, with each painting suffused with the ominous and the absurd. Through her intensely tactile and symbolically charged rendering of form and composition, Middleton endeavors to locate the metaphysical within the physical world, and to use the absence of resolution to create a source of emergent possibility.