Jason Middlebrook was born in Jackson, Michigan, in 1966. Currently he lives and works in Hudson, New York. He received a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the University of California in Santa Cruz, after which he completed a Master’s degree in Fine Arts at the Art Institute of San Francisco. From 1994 to 1995 he took part in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. He has exhibited at various international institutions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, MASS MoCa in North Adams and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2014, his work was presented at the SITE Santa Fe Biennial.
Middlebrook’s early work, made during his years living in New York, is marked by his interest in the creative reuse of materials. After moving to Hudson in 2008, Middlebrook established a profound relationship with nature and dedicated himself to the reworking of wood, obtained from the natural surroundings: cut, sectioned and carved tree trunks become canvases on which abstract forms, graphic patterns and extreme geometries flourish, oscillating between the artificiality of scientific and technological components and the forms and structures present in Nature itself.
In recent years, he has supplemented his production with pictorial and illustrative works, in which he retrieves graphic and geometric motifs from his works on wood, updating them and combining them with scenes, fragments and visions of reality that he draws directly from his own experience.