DODGEgallery is pleased to present A Break from Content: Jason Middlebrook. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with DODGEgallery.

Middlebrook will present an exhibition of works that are inspired by his long-standing interest in abstraction and his affinity towards intersecting disciplines. The entire 2,000sq/ft gallery will be filled with painting, sculpture, and works that occupy the space in between. Responding to the architecture of the gallery, Middebrook will align and counteract the receding perspective of the space with scale shifts. Repetition and variation is a contradiction that exists within the pieces themselves and that will influence the entire installation. Middlebrook has grown increasingly interested in creating works for particular contexts, deeming every opportunity site-specific.

Both the subject and material of Middlebrook’s practice points to the complex relationship between nature and humanity. From his rural California roots to his current home in Hudson Valley, Middlebrook continues to be both mesmerized and compelled by nature, perhaps the most influential subject of his life and work. Combining personal responsibility with an awareness of our broader impact, Middlebrook makes work that relates to the exchange of nature and humankind, whether fraught or symbiotic. His exploration of this familiar subject is becoming increasingly abstract.

For the past three years, Middlebrook has been investigating a particular surface that is both infinitely variable and uniform. It is a body of work called Planks that is object and painting, three dimensional and flat. Middlebrook hand-selects often overlooked planes of wood that are the internal cuts of tree trunks exposing years of growth between bark and rugged edges. He then works on the surface with highly saturated pigment, at times following the natural pattern of grain or exposing the grain itself, and at times imposing contrary marks. The reverence and contradiction within his process is reflective of our discontent relationship with nature.

Middlebrook will also include works on panel that hang in collaboration with his planks. Selecting material for their conceptual import, Middlebrook views the wood panels as natural materials that are further along the chain of human influence. Returning to the roots of his own practice, Middlebrook is predominantly painting abstraction. Whether borrowing from the curves of nature or the geometry of urbanity, Middlebrook has developed a vernacular of imagery that confronts and expands the viewer’s sense of space. His work is detailed and expansive, it is physical and illusionary, and like humanity, it is significant and temporal.

Jason Middlebrook lives and works in Hudson, NY. Born in Jackson, Michigan in 1966, Middlebrook received a BFA from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1990 and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in California in 1994. Middlebrook participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York from 1994 to 1995. His work has been exhibited in public institutions including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Arthouse, Austin, TX; Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Museo de Arte de El Salvador, San Salvador, El Salvador; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL; Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX; New Museum, New York, NY; Palazzo Delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea, Sienna, Italy; Santa Monica Museum of Contemporary Art, Santa Monica, CA; Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC; Wellcome Trust, London, United Kingdom; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Middlebrook received The Joan Mitchell Foundation 2010 Grant, and is currently working on public commissions including the MTA Art for Transit Commission NY. Middlebrook’s work is in the public collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Microsoft Corporate Art Collection, Redmond, WA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; New Museum, New York, NY; Progressive Art Collection, Mayfield, OH; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.