Press Release
Retrospective is pleased to present a show of new works by Letha Wilson and Jason Middlebrook. Both artists use landscape as subject for investigating the space between image and materiality, nature and culture, order and entropy. The artists have a long professional and personal history with each other; Letha first began working for Jason as his studio assistant in 1999. Working together over the years, they are now both friends and family to each other, bridging ideas and practices across generations while both rooted in their upbringings in Colorado and California, respectively.
Jason Middlebrook will present a series of new plank paintings. In this ongoing body of work, carved and hewn tree trunks are recycled, and imbued with new meaning, through painting and drawing. Allowing for the grain of the wood to determine an applied mark, or letting the grain show through geometric compositions, the works act as both a record of the planks’ natural origin and growth and the artist’s process. Letha Wilson’s sculptural photographs also act as both an index of the natural world a document of her layered studio process. Wilson's artwork uses photographs of and materials from the natural landscape as a starting point for interpretation and confrontation. The ability for a photograph to transport the viewer is both called upon, and questioned. Sculptural interventions attempt to compensate for the photograph’s failure to fully encompass the site it represents.
The exhibition will run concurrently with a show of new works by Landon Metz in a row house at 438 Carroll Street.