HUDSON, New York — Nature and its complex relationship with man has always been an inspiration for Jason Middlebrook in creating his immersive sculptures. However, it wasn’t until his move to upstate New York that he began to find his artistic language.
“A teacher in graduate school told me I was conceptually promiscuous, which I always loved,” said Middlebrook. “I think every artist invents their own ways of making art.”
Middlebrook relocated his Brooklyn studio to the provincial spaces of Hudson in 2008. The abundance of trees and timber in the area led him to work with wooden planks, which he later started painting with vibrant geometric shapes while preserving the integrity and irregularities of the lumber. These immersive sculptural paintings are exempliary of his conceptual approach. Middlebrook loved being an abstract painter, even during his days at San Francisco Art Institute, and it’s the collision of the environment and art history techniques that became his signature oeuvre. “All these shapes are like man versus nature,” he said. “Nature is the form and man is the paint.”
It was this tension between the man-made and natural environment that prompted Middlebrook’s interactive installation at SITE Santa Fe’s biennial, SITElines 2014. He created a site-specific work, “Your General Store,” for which he transformed an old shipping container into a replica of a 19th-century barter general store. The interior of the container is lined with parquets of wood from trees around the region and merchandise, handmade or collected, by more than 40 artists.
SITE Sante Fe SITElines 2014 opens July 20 and runs through January 11 at 1606 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
