Chase C. Middleton (1989) is an Australian artist based between New York and New Haven, Connecticut. Her childhood was spent in the Australian outback with a love of photography emerging as reaction to boredom and frustration as an only child.
In 2012 she completed her BFA in photography and in 2016 received her Honours degree at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, in Victoria, Australia. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally. She was recently a chosen as a finalist in the Australian National Portrait Prize, and is currently embarking on an MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art.
About ‘Terminal Mystery‘:
Terminal Mystery is a series of images made in a fisherman’s village on the Northern coast of New South Wales, Australia. The town named Iuka, which aptly means “near the sea” in an indigenous Australian dialect, serves mostly as a place of retirement. I became interested in the locals of this beautiful yet strange place. They seemed to be suspended in a moment of the in-between and transition.
I spent a year walking the isles of the local grocery store engaging with strangers in the hope that they would invite me into their homes and allow me to take their portrait. I chose to blend these documentary style photographs with vignettes of surrealist gestures, pointing to the peaceful absurdity and isolation experienced in Iluka.
