Injection

David Middlebrook is a master of materials, beginning as a ceramic artist and evolving to a broad range of stone, marble and bronze works weighing from 50 lbs. to 50 tons. He has established himself as a specialist in large-scale, site-specific work.

Middlebrook’s Injection is a majestic bronze and stone sculpture that was installed at the pond’s edge near the Dublin Community Recreation Center in Coffman Park as part of the original Titration exhibition series in 2007.

Injection is approximately 6 feet tall and consists of three unique sections, a steel base, followed by basalt, and topped with a bronze cone-shaped piece that completes the sculpture. The large fingerprint that covers the top of the cone is that of the artist.

Middlebrook is an Associate Director of Fine Arts at San Jose State University in California’s Silicon Valley and maintains a studio in Los Gatos, Calif. His visiting artist positions have taken him to the northern tip of Australia and to South Africa. He credits these experiences with the primitive aesthetic influence in his work.

Middlebrook sustains a professional relationship with a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, where he finds the availability of virtually every stone in the world, combined with a thousand years of tradition and the combined experience of a variety of artists, which provide an invaluable asset.

Dublin Arts Council chose the exhibition title Titration to reflect the addition of a new concentration of sculpture into the community’s midst. Titration is a common laboratory method used to add a measured quantity of a reagent, called a titrant, into an unknown reagent, called a reactant, to produce a chemical reaction.

The individual artworks reflect a metaphor of the exhibition’s name. Much as titrant is added to a reactant drop by drop, this exhibition was intended to change our community’s environment, artwork by artwork, as an endpoint of cultural identity is realized.

The Titration exhibition was curated as part of Ripple Effect: Artistic Impact of the Scioto River, a new project of Dublin Arts Council designed to offer ongoing and unique opportunities for visual, performing and interpretive art projects associated with multi-level investigation of the Scioto River.

Titration involves fluid properties in the figurative sense: our changing community, Dublin’s growing collection of public art and Dublin’s sense of cultural identity. In the literal, the exhibition dovetailed with the introduction of Riverboxes, another public art initiative that encourages historical and artistic exploration and response to the river in our midst.