Jason Middlebrook My Landscape
My Landscape provides viewers a hint of the importance of the natural world to Jason Middlebrook’s work, and also the particular influence of the places where he lives and works. In 2005 the artist moved from Brooklyn to the Hudson Valley; trading the city for a more rural environment added a new dimension to his practice, complementing his examinations of society’s impact on the environment with more personal musings on his own relationship to nature and the local landscape. Much of the work on view at MASS MoCA was directly inspired by both Middlebrook’s home outside Hudson and time spent in North Adams while in residency at the museum. The natural beauty of the region, as well as the intersection of nature and industry that characterizes it, is mirrored in the work in the exhibition. Given the exhibition’s range of sculpture, painting, and drawing, the “landscape” of the show’s title could just as easily refer to the varied terrain of Middlebrook’s practice.
cover: I’ve Been Drawing Cliffs My Whole Life, 2013; spray paint on maple; 93.625 x 41 x 1.375 in (237.80 x 104.14 x 3.49 cm); photo by Karen Pearson. All images courtesy the artist and DODGEgallery, New York.
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or nearly two decades Jason Middlebrook has examined numerous human interventions in the landscape— ranging from the suburban yard to the Alaskan Pipeline—drawing attention to the effects that our consumer culture has on the environment. He has also documented our urge to copy nature, to manicure it, even to manufacture it. This interest in our impulse to re-create the natural world, as well as our seeming indifference to nature’s vulnerability, is matched by his fascination with the resilience of nature. Influenced by Robert Smithson’s theories of entropy, Middlebrook has documented the smallest triumphs of the plant world against the city sprawl in images of weeds bursting through the sidewalk. He has also imagined in dramatic, sculptural form a future in which museums such as the Guggenheim and the Getty have become
overgrown ruins. Inspired by the dramatic moment in the film Planet of the Apes, when Charlton Heston comes upon the Statue of Liberty half buried in sand, the artist manifests in his own work similar images of the follies of mankind and the perseverance of nature. The centerpiece of Middlebrook’s exhibition at MASS MoCA evokes the power of nature, as well as our desire but ultimate failure, to replicate it. “Our fear of nature,” Middlebrook explains, “results in our complete misunderstanding of it.” Attempting to bring the spectacle of the outdoors inside, the artist has suspended a working fountain-cumwaterfall from the gallery’s ceiling trusses. From a height of nearly 30 feet, water cascades between three floating ponds, disappearing mysteriously through an opening in the museum floor. Titled Falling Water, after Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic Kaufmann
residence in western Pennsylvania, the fountain is constructed from large, Styrofoam rectangular blocks that hint at the massive concrete cantilevers of Wright’s design, albeit in a state of decay. Middlebrook discovered the material on-site at the museum. The remains of an artwork exhibited years prior, the scarred foam illustrates the importance of re-purposed materials to Middlebrook’s philosophy and aesthetic. Looking distressed and weathered, they recall crumbling buildings—a reminder of the postindustrial landscape and history of our region. At the same time, their ruin-like appearance reminds us of the great destruction that can be wrought by water, bringing to mind the effects of Hurricane Irene on North Adams and neighboring communities, as well as the large-scale devastation of Super Storm Sandy in New York and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.
Middlebrook’s large drawing on paper, A Fresh Start (2009-2012), imagines the aftermath of a flood of even greater proportions. Begun while Middlebrook was in Sweden, the work was inspired both by the threat of global warming and Stockholm’s unique archipelago. The artist imagined a future society of islands, each housing a necessary part of the larger whole: a solar farm, a prison, a stadium, a boat repair—each specialization set apart. Seen from a distance, the interlocking islets resemble tree bark—a nod to the complex ecosystem which resides in a single tree as well as civilization’s dependence on the natural world and its resources. The array of painted wood planks lining the walls of the gallery presents a more joyful union of man and nature. Begun in 2008, the ongoing series features boldly graphic patterns painted on milled hard woods, such as ash, curly maple, English elm, and Cairo walnut— sourced from a mill in Sheffield, Massachusetts. The organically shaped planks offer a seductive foil for the artist’s vibrant marks. His paintings often point to abstraction’s roots in nature— in the ripples of a pond, the grid of a spider web, the rings of a geode. Rather than merely replicating nature, however, Middlebrook is actually sampling it, while both celebrating
and transforming it. Taking advantage of the museum’s soaring architecture, several planks reach heights nearing 20 feet, further emphasizing the link between the boards and the grand trees from which they were cut. Working intuitively, Middlebrook always begins with the wood, working both with and against its grain. The results vary, from the fluid, black and white lines of works like Black Betty to the glossy, industrial colors and hard-edged lines of Negative Spaces Not So Negative. The artist has cited numerous influences which inform these paintings, from folk art to the totem poles of the Pacific Northwest, graffiti, and pop and op art, as well as minimalism. In their endless iterations based on a limited vocabulary of lines, they recall the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt. Middlebrook’s planks are similarly laborintensive and fastidiously drawn, requiring yards of tape and hours of patience to mask
out each separate color. In the works’ shapes and slick surfaces—and in the way they are casually propped against the wall—they recall John McCracken’s glossy planks. Like McCracken, Middlebrook is a Californian and similarly influenced by surf culture and the electric colors and psychedelic design of the boards. Middlebrook’s joy in the steady, yet always changing practice of painting his planks is not unlike a surfer’s daily experience on the water. Middlebrook’s embrace of repetition and the cycles of the natural world have also fostered a sensitivity to subtle detail and variation. A new wall drawing for the museum’s second-floor Hunter mezzanine (across from the entrance to the Sol LeWitt retrospective) is an illustration of the nuance he has tracked watching the landscape change over four seasons on his drive to and from the museum. Inspired by the trees seen along the way, Middlebrook has drawn and painted 20 birches along the corridor. Drawn as if propping up the architecture, each marks the location of a wooden ceiling beam. Titled Never Plumb, the work is an homage to the beautiful imperfections of both the wobbly trees and these aging buildings where a straight line is impossible to find. (A play on words, the title may also be a comic warning against installing a working fountain inside a museum gallery and its walls.) Susan Cross Curator
left to right: Keep Digging, 2013, detail; acrylic and spray paint on English elm; 96.5 x 31.5 x 1.5 in (245.11 x 80.01 x 3.81 cm). Sketch for Falling Water, 2013; ink on paper; 11 x 8.5 in (27.94 x 21.59 cm). A Fresh Start, 2009–2012, detail; graphite on paper; 55.5 x 132.5 in (140.97 x 336.55 cm). Birch on Birch (In Every Tree there is a Tree), 2013; acrylic on birch; 113 x 16.75 x 1.375 in (287.02 x 42.55 x 3.49 cm); photo by Karen Pearson.
Jason Middlebrook was born in 1966 in Jackson, Michigan. He received a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1990 and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1994. He participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program, New York, in 1994 and 1995. He has exhibited his work in solo and group exhibitions at numerous institutions nationally and internationally. The artist lives and works in Hudson, New York.
Jason Middlebrook: My Landscape May 26, 2013–April 6, 2014 This exhibition is supported by a grant from the Artist’s Resource Trust, with additional funding provided by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, Hal & Jodi Hess, Robert & Nancy Magoon, and Kent & Vicki Logan.
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