Jason Middlebrook

B. 1966 After earning his BFA from the University of California, Santa Cruz and his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, Jason Middlebrook was accepted to the Whitney Independent Program in 1994. The New York City landscape was a great contrast to the expansive western landscape in which Jason had spent his formative years. The contrast of rural and urban life, his interest in Earthworks artists such as Smithson and Heifer, and his brother's studies as a scientist provided inspiration for his art. Much his work continues to examine man's relationship to nature, urban landscapes, and cultural institutions, drawing connections between geology and biology. Besides suggesting that there is a link between the layers below the ground and below the skin, Jason's work also explores the future of art as a ruin, inferring that decay and decomposition are the signifiers of beauty in our everyday world.

Jason had his first solo exhibition in New York at Arena Gallery in Brooklyn in 1995 and has since been featured in a number of group and solo exhibitions including the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York and the Palazzo Delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy. He came to ULAE in 2001 to produce a print for the 2002 Artist's Space Benefit. His interest and enthusiasm for the printmaking medium has inspired him to continue working with ULAE.