MIA BERGERON
Chain Reaction
If it wasn’t for the project that consumed nearly a year of Mia Bergeron’s life, the artist’s most recent body of work may have never happened. “I spent most of 2018 working on one giant private commissioned painting depicting flames,” she explains. “Working on one huge piece pushed my technical abilities, but it also gave me room to examine this idea of an emotional landscape. A 14-by-8foot painting depicting a table set with hundreds of candelabras inevitably made me think about what each flame meant and how they related to each other.”
As a result of this experience Bergeron began to actualize the connections she was building elsewhere. Her exhibition at Robert Lange Studios, Outside In, is a reflection of just this—the title born out of a work of the same name from a previous show she did at the gallery.
“It’s basically about looking into different types of scenes that show an emotional response to something,” she says.
While the experience creating these works has been highly satisfying for Bergeron, it has not been without its challenges. “I think what I’m learning right now is that because I was only working on one piece, some of my ideas were growing in my head, but I was also a little bit out of practice creating a lot of these paintings,” she shares. “It was kind of a hard liftoff getting started, but I’m really glad to be back working this way because I get to filter out more ideas and more things come through, but it’s also way more uncomfortable.”
One of the largest paintings in the series, titled Fissure, represents the “shift going on” in Bergeron’s work. “It’s that shift into a bit of imaginary symbolism, and that piece specifically is where some of that comes out,” she says. The self-portrait shows her
sitting in a plastic lawn chair in the middle of an arctic landscape.
“I was working toward a cross between memory and dream—seemingly disparate moments that somehow overlap in our subconscious,” she explains. “For me, the Arctic has long been a place of fascination due to its inherent inaccessibility. Similarly, trying to see ourselves with clarity and objectivity in relation to the rest of the world is an exciting yet difficult path to follow.”
Dreamlike elements are woven throughout the series, resulting in a “slightly distorted reality” that has been captivating Bergeron’s attention as of late. “It makes me think about how I go about my daily life,” she reflects.
Another example of art imitating life can be seen in Red Chair.
“I named it Red Chair because it’s easy to miss the red chair in the background,” says Bergeron. “It has some of those same elements [as Fissure]—it’s transparent and things are overlapping. All of the paintings have a lot of lines this time. I’ve been trying to bring more structure in. There’s this technical element in my paintings that seems to be happening in my life...This way of processing and relating to the world has become a major part of how I understand my own journey.”