File:Jason Middlebrook Underlife.jpg

Outdoor public sculpture by Jason Middlebrook, Underlife (Steel, fiberglass, glass tile and grout , 180" x 540" x 276", 2013–14, Buffalo AKG Art Museum). The image illustrates a key body of work in Jason Middlebrook's career beginning in the late 2000s, when he began producing site-specific public artworks that explore relationships between the natural and human-made environments. In this specific work, he created a monumental, tentacle-like outdoor sculpture in steel, fiberglass and tile in response to the Frederick Law Olmsted–designed landscape surrounding the Buffalo AKG Museum campus. It is animated by glittering glass and resembles the root system of a tree displaced from its natural, underground state, looming aboveground and exposed. This work was publicly permanently installed in prominent museum campus and discussed in art publications and press publications.

Artist Jason Middlebrook. Copyright held by the artist.

Jason Middlebrook (artist)

Entire artwork

Yes

The image serves an informational and educational purpose as the primary means of illustrating a key body of work in Jason Middlebrook's career: his site-specific public projects, which date from the late 2000s onward and include works in paint, sculpture and mosaic. This work represented a departure from his well-known plank sculptures. His public artworks engage with nuances of nature, place and architectural space and explore relationships between the natural and human-made environments, merging geometric abstraction and organic materials and motifs, as well as conceptualism and craftsmanship. Because the article is about an artist and his work, the omission of the image would significantly limit a reader's understanding and ability to understand this later, longstanding body of work, which brought Middlebrook ongoing recognition beyond his gallery work through installations in public spaces, coverage by major critics and publications and museum and institutional commissions. Middlebrook's work of this type and this work is discussed in the article and by writers cited in the article.

There is no free equivalent of this or any other of this series by Jason Middlebrook, and the work no longer is viewable, so the image cannot be replaced by a free image.

The image will not affect the value of the original work or limit the copyright holder's rights or ability to distribute the original due to its low resolution and the general workings of the art market, which values the actual work of art. Because of the low resolution, illegal copies could not be made.