Jason Middlebrook

b. Jackson, MI, 1966

Jason Middlebrook is an artist who paints meandering abstractions on slabs of wood. He weaves delicately painted lines through the existing pattern of wood grain, traces the rough edges of vertical slabs, and paints concentric ripples from the center of round-cross sections of trees. Middlebrook reflects on our relationship with nature which is alternatively adversarial, fearful, worshipful, or harmonious.

Middlebrook has his own complex association with the natural world, which connotes comfort and security while also having the power to destroy. He grew up in Santa Cruz and was there in 1989 when the Lomo Prieta earthquake struck, and Middlebrook recalls the widespread damage and the fear that his roof would collapse. Upon moving to Brooklyn, he began to make art about nature colliding with the city, focusing on weeds and plant life native to New York which stretch from cracks in the sidewalks and crawl over chain-link fences.

The relationship between humans and nature is a recurring theme in the artist’s exhibitions of decorated landfill waste and his Public Art Network Year in Review 2012 award-winning subway mosaic Brooklyn Seeds. When the Congress Avenue contemporary art center, now known as the Contemporary Austin, reopened in Texas in 2010, Middlebrook used several tons of the construction detritus to craft furniture made of vintage steel joists, lumber and glass.

In 2006 Middlebrook relocated from Williamsburg to Columbia County in upstate New York. There he began sourcing milled indigenous trees—curly maple, oak, walnut, elm and ash—as the medium for his sculptural paintings. Departing from his earlier work, which took a more literal and representational approach to environmental themes, Middlebrook appropriated trees as his canvas. Middlebrook is interested in the role of trees in structuring our world, both in their living form as producers of oxygen and home to insects, animals, and fungi; and as material to construct the very spaces that separate us from nature. Middlebrook centers them as witnesses to histories of drought, flooding, and forest fires, and to our own attitudes of simultaneous symbiosis and destruction. 

Middlebrook paints in acrylic on a piece of wood and contributes colorful layers to the tree’s log of history. Skeins of negative space permeate his paintings, through which the natural grain of the wood is visible. He says: "I kind of feel like a visitor making this gesture on the surface of the wood; the tree basically did all the work—a 100 years of work. My paint, it’s just sitting there kind of like a skin. We have basically built a ‘skin’ of structures on the surface of the planet. And as soon as those structures go belly up, the planet will reclaim the surface and break that skin. We are just a bunch of temporary visitors.”

Middlebrook received his Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of California at Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA. In 1995, he completed an Independent Study Program at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

His work is held in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New Museum, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. Middlebrook lives and works in Hudson, NY.