Tricia Middleton's installation Midnight Gallery Rambles seemed to exist in a state of simultaneous sedimentation and erosion. Where the boundaries of these forces divided was virtually indistinguishable. In this sense her work took on a generative quality, but one inflected by a wry between-ness. Perhaps this coy wink developed from the question of whether destruction is its own kind of becoming.

Midnight Gallery Rambles was an environment and an exhibition, and it addressed the gallery as both a set and a venue. A series of sculptures and video installations and architectural structures cohabited together, staking territories for their own crumbly activities. The temporary space of SAAG was coloured by red and blue lights, but remained dark and theatrical. Spray foam, bed sheets, drywall, glitter, and latex paint roiled in various stages of growth, collapse, and re-growth. Projections and monitors animated false walls and swaddling piles with the documents of their own making. The accoutrements, tools and packing material of the gallery were implicated in the formation of these caddywompus creations. Yet many of the works were discrete and self-contained, seemingly sufficient in themselves. The result was an exhibition that intertwined the history of its own materials and forms with the architectural space, the artist-as-performer, and the audience.

As I rambled my way through the Rambles I considered that this exhibition did not exist as static and complete at any one moment. The large scaffold structure in the centre of the gallery was a particularly good example of this quality. I thought it might droop and bend while I watched; its own unstable materiality implicated in its demise. It was this sense of slow collapse that somehow prolonged the experience of the exhibition itself. In this way the installation existed in a register of geologic time as well as immediate presence. Like a glacier that gradually calves ice, the scaffold was destined to soon crumble: a building site serac that would inevitably melt and disperse and become some other thing again. Through this realization gallery visitors were confronted by each work's own duration, experiencing the exhibition as an ensemble of others with life-spans all their own.

Undeniably, the cornerstone of the exhibition (and the work that compelled me most) was the visceral and intellectually puzzling architectural form built in the back part of the gallery. Combining performance-for-video, projection and installation, the work consisted of a long false wall built from drywall that was scattered all around with pink sparkly detritus. Shoes, sledge hammers and various cotton candy-coloured trash created a mise-en-scene of dilapidation. Large candles dripped wax down the piles of crud with an ironic elegiac sensibility. Behind the customized crumbling of the wall were stored all manner of gallery packing material and presentation objects. An enormous roll of bubble wrap, a teetering tower of plinths, cardboard boxes, folding chairs and little entomorphic packing peanuts all crammed in together. One part of the wall on the left-hand side was hacked through, revealing the gallery junk behind. Perhaps this was a nod to Michael Asher, but in this case institutional critique seemed subverted in the very contrivance of its staging. A wall erected simply to be torn apart.

On the right-hand side of this same wall large violently hacked holes and oozing streams of painted fabric emanated. One of the holes contained rear-projected videos on an ornately patterned screen (made from another bed sheet, I believe). At first, one witnessed a strange scene in the projection - ethereal and almost unrecognizable. A female figure entered the field and began to hack with a pick axe into what is revealed to be a wall. After she hacks for a while it becomes apparent that the video being witnessed was shot during the making (unmaking?) of the wall in which the projection is presented. The ruin became a cinema documenting its own destruction.

After seeing this work, it appeared that the whole exhibition was not what it appeared to be. The auratic was acted by the spectre of itself. This actress/artist was a crumbling facade: an apparition of a being that never was, a ghost that hallucinated itself. As witnesses (makers and unmakers as well) the audience teetered at the precipice, waiting for a break from the cycle of formation and erosion, only to find that the cycle was more like a whirlpool.