source: utseduau
Jaki Middleton (b. Sydney, 1979) completed both a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours class 1, 2002) and a Master of Visual Arts (2008), from Sydney College of the Arts, The University of Sydney. Middleton is a founding editor of Runway, an Australian contemporary art magazine based in Sydney, and was also the magazine’s Managing Editor from 2007–2011.

Since 2005, Middleton has collaborated with fellow artist David Lawrey, to construct sculptural works that incorporate motion, optical phenomena and repetition. In their 2010 kinetic sculptural work, Consolidated Life, the pair recreate a miniature scene of a seemingly endless corporate office, a recurring motif that has been repeated in a various films. For the artists, this scene merges the mundane and the spectacular, creating a metaphor for things which are at once immense and insignificant.

Appropriating iconic snippets of film, photography and history, Lawrey & Middleton revive and re-create these fragments within sculptural installations in order to observe, breakdown and reconfigure familiar experiences, and to present new relationships and narratives. Lawrey & Middleton are currently working on a series of large-scale sculptures and installations, for which they were awarded an Australia Council New Work grant in 2010.

Recent exhibitions include: Eyes, Lies and Illusions at the Australian Centre for Moving Image, Melbourne (2007); Experimenta Playground, International Biennale of Media Art, Performance Space, Sydney; Anne and Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia, Adelaide and Western Australian Museum, Perth (2008); The wayback machine, MOP Projects, Sydney (2008); Abandon Normal Devices, Foundation for Art and Creative Technology, Liverpool, UK (2009); New Acquisitions, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney (2009); Consolidated Life, Peloton, Sydney (2010); Awfully Wonderful at Performance Space, Sydney (2011); Otherworldly, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, USA (2011); The Way Forward, Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham, UK (2012).
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source: gallery9
David Lawrey (b. 1973, Melbourne) and Jaki Middleton (b. 1979, Sydney) are a creative partnership and artistic collaboration based in Sydney. Their work involves constructed sculptural works that incorporate motion, optical phenomena and repetition. Appropriating iconic snippets of film, photography and history, the artists re-stage these fragments within sculptural installations in order to observe, breakdown and reconfigure familiar narratives.

Recent exhibitions include Living in the Ruins of the Twentieth Century at UTS Gallery, Sydney (2013); Time & Vision at the Bargehouse Gallery, London (2012), Otherworldly at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York (2011); New Acquisitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; and Abandon Normal Devices at FACT, Liverpool, UK (both 2009). The artists have recently returned from a residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris. Lawrey & Middleton’s works have been collected by private collectors in Australia and overseas as well as the MCA, Sydney and the Wollongong City Gallery.