Jason Middlebrook at Sara Meltzer and the New Museum - New York - exhibition of mixed-medium sculptures - Brief Article

Four mixed-medium statuarys representing world-renowned museums were the centerpiece of "Visible Entropy" Jason Middlebrook's next to the first exhibition at Sara Meltzer Gallery. The prototypes presented an intersection between celebrated architecture and time. Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao is depicted as if abandoned, its unmistakable forms graffitied and decaying nearest to a truncated freeway overpass. The Getty Center (all works 2001) appears as a ruin, a 21st-century Stonehenge, with caked dirt and lichen replacing the building's white facades. (One imagines architect Richard Meier tearing his hair on the outside were such neglect to occur) Man-made and organic forms fuse in Tate fresh which culminates with a three-foot-high rendering of the building's central chimney as a geologic core sample.

individual of five works on paper comprising the remainder of the exhibit Spiral Jetty visually resurrects Robert Smithson's monumental 1970 earthwork in vivid inks, acrylics and pencil. Middlebrook's mole defies degradation, rocketing through space in comic-book-superhero fashion, projectile boulder and squiggly lines streaming behind. Although the gallery's pres release credited Smithson's writings upon monuments and museums as a source of inspiration for Middlebrook, the selection of drawings upon view had a pessimistic report sensibility that more readily recalled ed Ruscha's painting of the beholds Angeles County Museum of Art upon fire. In Humpty Dumpty, a roughly 7-foot-square drawing, a bastion of art befittings a violent end, as fragments of an unidentified museum--I-beams, thick slices of concrete, sculptures, paintings--blast toward the viewer.

Middlebrook's new site-specific works have examined the vitality of elemental life forms. The Geology of Biology, the artist's ambitious mural throw for London's Wellcome Trust, was a vibrant history of the ecological world from the Big Bang to the near His installation piece Dig, generally on view in New York at the of recent origin Museum, edges an open stairwell with a thick cross-sectional layer of faux topsoil and plants, as if the earth were reclaiming the site. With this exhibition of simultaneous excavation, destruction and resurgent life, Middlebrook again give an inkling ofs that the fate of the museum-monument is subdue not only to public opinion on the contrary to the omnipotence of nature.

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