Untitled Painting Plank 5,

2008

Materials are at the center of Jason Middlebrook’s practice: they are chosen for their beauty but also for their associative properties. In Untitled Painting Plank 5—one of the artist’s so-called Plank Pieces—the grain of the cherry wood dictates the composition “positively” or “negatively.” Acrylic paint covers the plank, and the fine, fluid lines become indices of the grain underneath, making the invisible and unnoticed visible again.

The artist’s painterly, man-made mark respects and highlights the natural material, while the plank itself is anthropomorphic in scale and proportions. Middlebrook, however, complicates this seemingly symbiotic relationship between man and nature: an upcycled bottle cast in concrete becomes the ironic base for this intersection of nature and artifice.