[1] Middleton's artistic practice often involves the creation of elaborate, large-scale installations built out of a variety of materials including trash, wax, craft supplies, and other ephemera.
[2] Taking its title from a novel by Nikolai Gogol, Dark Souls was designed to resemble a decaying bourgeois parlour and involved five connecting rooms, each filled with garbage and refuse, towering sculptures, and two video projections.
Titled Form is the Destroyer of Force, Without Severity There Can Be No Mercy, Middleton's installation, like Dark Souls, took found objects like shoes, vases, tea sets, and artificial roses and transformed them into uncanny assemblages covered in wax and glitter.
The exhibition, which featured other prominent Canadian and international artists including David Altmejd, Yinka Shonibare MBE, and Sarah Sze, considered material excess and theatricality in recent installation art,[5][6] and questioned the nature-culture divide.
[7] Other notable group exhibitions include Nothing to Declare: Current Sculpture from Canada at The Power Plant in Toronto in 2009,[8] and the Quebec Triennial at the Musée d'art contemporain in Montreal in 2008.