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2020

Budding Bird Blind (The Great Bird Blind Debate)

An ongoing project, as trees grow to replace the bird blind structure.

Plantings, for forest succession: American tulip trees, flowering dogwoods, northern red oak, maples, and serviceberry trees.
Bird blind structure – recapitulation of the 100+ year old playhouse at Planting Fields: wood, hardware, stucco, paint.
Dimensions variable.

Commissioned by Planting Fields Foundation for "The Great Bird Blind Debate" with Mark Dion

Making of the Budding Bird Blind – video excerpt

The sculptural models demonstrate the multiple phases this project will undergo in the coming years. It is estimated to be a 12-year process for this forest succession to reach fruition from the newly planted trees, during which sections of the bird blind structure will be disassembled to make way for tree growth, until fully disassembled to leave only bird habitat in its place.

In the face of such dire species decline and habitat loss around the world, I wanted to make something that was generative, even long after the artwork was gone.

The bird blind I made has numerous trees growing through the structure, through the walkway, through the roof and sides. The trees were planted and the blind constructed next to an existing forest edge, using trees highly attractive to birds. Over time, as the trees grow and mature, sections of the bird blind structure will be dismantled to allow for the growth of the trees. Eventually, after a number of years, there will no longer be any of the bird blind remaining, as it will by then be replaced by actual bird habitat through a process akin to the phenomenon of forest succession – in which a forest moves through expansion and reduction, like that of a body. In this way, the project reveals itself only through numerous return visits to the site, where the priority of the project becomes inverted: what was at first a structure to observe birds from ultimately gives way to a habitat for the birds themselves.

—Excerpt from interview between David Brooks and Mark Dion for the exhibition book The Great Bird Blind Debate

Planting trees attractive to birds for forest succession process, and constructing bird blind structure around newly planted trees.
The Great Bird Blind Debate, is a limited edition, full-color, hard cover book published by Planting Fields Foundation in conjunction with the exhibition by the same name. Illustrations are paired with an exchange between artists Mark Dion and David Brooks, a Planting Fields bird list, timeline of ornithology, and contributions by New York State Parks Commissioner Erik Kulleseid, J. Drew Lanham, Nadir Souirgi, Corinne Spencer, Hara Woltz and Planting Fields Foundation Executive Director Gina J. Wouters. Design by Jeffrey Jenkins. Photographs by David Almeida and Jeffrey Jenkins.

2016

Continuous Service Altered Daily

Disassembled 1976 John Deere 3300 combine harvester with various components sandblasted, brass-plated, and gold powder-coated; display vitrines, wood pedestals, acrylic bonnets, and signage.

View: Continuous Service Altered Daily - the movie loop

The original 1976 John Deere 3300 series combine harvester and a schematic depicting its deconstruction into every single component part.
The combine components made an asteroid field with no distinctive beginning or end; machine parts were grouped into nine zones that represent nine continuously occurring ecosystem services upon which we rely daily.
The combine was drained of all oil and disassembled methodically into every single component.

Continuous Service Altered Daily is a site-engaged sculptural array that uses the disassembly of a 1976 John Deere combine harvester, a beacon of agricultural technology, as a material and spatial analogy for how we perceive the ecosystems that surround us. Every last component of the combine was arranged and displayed, without a single piece excluded, in an ambling procession throughout The Aldrich’s grounds and galleries. Each arrangement was poetically likened to an ecosystem service.

Brooks’s method of presentation offers the machine’s shell and innards in varying degrees of material transformation: a) in its weathered condition, b) sandblasted to remove all evidence of wear and tear, c) brass plated, and d) powder coated, elevating the individualized status of the pieces as precious objects.

Within the Museum, each zone is represented by an engraved metal placard describing the designated ecosystem service, and every object on display has been given an interpretive individual label that supports this correlation. Thus, Brooks subverts the traditional role of didactics by presenting the viewer with an interpretative conundrum.

—Excerpt from exhibition publication essay by curator Amy Smith-Stewart

Combine components ranging from weathered pieces, with the trademark John Deere green still visible, to sandblasted, returning the object back to its material origin.
Reference Images: Constantin Brancusi’s Male Torso (1917) and Bird in Space (1923)
Objects brass-plated with a polished finish are re-presented as precious artifacts or modernist Brancusi-esque sculptures in museological displays.
Installation view from the Aldrich Museum sculpture garden.
Continuous Service Altered Daily coloring book for all ages, produced in collaboration with The Aldrich and local middle school students.

2018 - forever

Permanent Field Observations

Thirty bronze castings of ephemeral natural objects within Storm King’s wooded perimeter; permanently affixed directly next to the subjects from which they were cast.
Dimensions variable

Commissioned by Storm King Art Center, NY

View: Exhibition website
View: Project documentary video

preparatory waxes
(Top) bronze lost wax process (Bottom) installing finished bronze casts permanently in situ
A map on view in the Museum Building gallery plots the precise locations of field observations, which visitors can use to perform their own expeditions.

An artist who has participated in many scientific
expeditions, David Brooks believes that a great challenge
of addressing climate change is that its effects are often
imperceptible. Brooks has created thirty bronze castings
of ephemeral natural objects within Storm King’s
woods—such as tree roots embracing rocks, or delicately
intertwined branches—and permanently affixed them
next to the subjects from which they were cast.

As future weather patterns alter the site in unknown ways,
these intimate replicas will act as time capsules. Brooks
has stated, “I’m asking viewers to reconcile the intimacy of
apprehending the sculptural object in the quietude of the
woods with the vastness of the sculpture’s potential lifespan
of thousands of years. Such a reconciliation of disparate
perceptions is similar to how one might introspectively
experience the conflicted notion and existence of climate
change itself.

—Excerpted from the exhibition’s online description

bronze cast permanently affixed next to the object from which it was cast (to remain in situ forever)
bronze cast permanently affixed next to the object from which it was cast (to remain in situ forever)
bronze cast permanently affixed next to the object from which it was cast (to remain in situ forever)
bronze cast permanently affixed next to the object from which it was cast (to remain in situ forever)
bronze cast permanently affixed next to the object from which it was cast (to remain in situ forever)
bronze cast permanently affixed next to the object from which it was cast (to remain in situ forever)

2017 - 2018

Rock, Mosquito and Hummingbird: A Prehistory of Governors Island

Continuous profile core extractions from three historic sites on Governors Island, NYC; situated in the subterranean magazine of Fort Jay atop a customized scaffold system that follows the flight paths of an Asian Tiger Mosquito and a Ruby-throated Hummingbird through the vaulted architecture that once housed military ordnances.

CW from top left: Plan for Enlargement and Reconstruction of Governor’s Island Military Post, ca. 1907; Island’s original 1813 footprint – red circles indicate 2017 core drilling sites; Fort Jay in 1982, courtesy the National Park Service
CW from top: Rotosonic drill near historic hospital extracting continuous core down to 125ft. – through glacial till, original 19th c. seawall, to bedrock; First section of Manhattan Schist extracted; Our first coring in July, 2017.
Bronze monument permanently installed atop the first drill site’s 90-foot boring at Evans Road. Each of the three sites is indicated by a bronze monument and narrative plaque commemorating the location, depth and date of the borings.
Top: mosquito flight paths based on heat maps done in the lab. Bottom: plan and elevation views of the cores’ layout in Fort Jay’s subterranean vaulted magazine that once housed military ordnances.

Rock, Mosquito, and Hummingbird digs down to the core of the place we now call Governors Island, to expose the strata of history of this floating rock at the entrance of NY Harbor—layers stretching down to a foundation of Manhattan Schist that predates complex life on earth.

Probing three sites on the northern side of the original footprint of the island, Brooks bored through the ground surface to a range of 90 to 125 feet in depth, telling a story of this ancient place in cobbles, soil, silt, shells, clay and bedrock. This excavated narrative leads visitors beyond the dominant military and colonial history of the site to imagine a landmass that for millions of years played a part in a larger strategic operation—the origin of land and life itself.

Situated in the subterranean magazine of historic Fort Jay, Brooks’ winding sculptural intervention of three long continuous core samples are assembled in contrasting trajectories referencing fast time (the flight of a mosquito and hummingbird) and slow time (the creation of bedrock).

—Excerpted from the exhibition’s press release

Entrance to the subterranean magazine with the beginning of each of the three core samples visible: the top concrete surface of Evans Road, The Hospital sidewalk, and Pershing Hall lot.
Top: detail of the top concrete surface of Evans Road. Bottom: detail of the top asphalt surface of the Pershing Hall lot.
Vaulted tunnel with visible original 19th C. seawall; Magazine Court with glacial till installed atop three pathways – the straight line emblematic of geological time, mosquito and hummingbird flight paths emblematic of rapid time.
Bottom: bedrock core sample of Manhattan schist.
Top: Asian Tiger Mosquito flight path entering and exiting the West Powder Magazine. Bottom: Geologic core path entering the North Powder Magazine with sections of Manhattan schist and fossilized marine organisms visible.
Top: Ruby-throated hummingbird flight path terminating at East Powder Magazine. Bottom: Each path terminates with a bronze plaque (consistent with designs throughout the island) narrating the unique characteristics of its trajectory.
Terminating section of the Asian Tiger Mosquito flight path in the Southwest Powder Magazine (with sections of a feldspar-rich igneous rock visible, not known to exist on the island prior to this boring).

2014 - 2024

Lonely Loricariidae

Fish species unknown to science, glass fish tanks, pumps, filters, aluminum stadium seating.

Commission by the Crystal Bridges’ Momentary, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2023-2024
&
Installation for solo exhibition at Art Basel Statements sector; Basel, Switzerland in 2014

An undescribed species of Loricariidae pulled from under a rock ledge in about 3 feet of water in the Amazon, by Nathan Lujan PhD., September 2013. Xingu, Brazil
Phylogenetic tree showing all known Loricariidae species along with a map illustrating their natural range (shaded area).
“L-Number” list indicating all unknown Loricariidae species that circulate through the European aquarium trade and a map illustrating their unregulated supply routes for exploration to Europe.

The sculptural installation features living armored catfishes from the Amazon, each representing a distinct, undescribed, ‘new to science’ species that lacks a scientific name. These bizarrely beautiful creatures play critical roles in sustaining the ecological function of the most biodiverse freshwater ecosystem on Earth.

The fish in the installation, which have been entwined by the global diaspora of exotic fishes in the aquarium trade, look back at us from a spectator’s perspective—inviting affection and care for their native environment while underlining how much more needs to be understood to properly document, monitor, and conserve biodiversity throughout the tropics.

Focusing on the evolutionary splendor of the Amazonian Basin and the complex, interdependent relationship between science and commerce, the exhibit emerges from Brooks’s two-decades of expeditionary collaboration with explorer and biologist Dr. Nathan Lujan, whose research seeks to address these knowledge gaps. During the run of this exhibition, biologists began the process of scientifically surveying and taxonomically describing the species in this installation, bringing humanity one step closer to understanding, monitoring, and conserving tropical biodiversity.

—Excerpted from the exhibition website:
https://themomentary.org/enduring-amazon-david-brooks/

Installation at Crystal Bridges’ Momentary 2023-2024
Installation at Crystal Bridges’ Momentary 2023-2024
Installation at Crystal Bridges’ Momentary 2023-2024
Installation at Crystal Bridges’ Momentary 2023-2024
Installation views and details of solo exhibition at Art Basel Statements sector; Basel, Switzerland, 2014
T-shirts were made and given away in lieu of a press release or publication. The small, entirely illegible print palpably illustrates how many species of the Loricariidae fish are sold in the market but still unknown to science.

2019 - ongoing

Studs and Bycatch

Metal studs, fiberglass taxidermy fish, hardware, pontoon work barge – after exhibition the structure was sunk for the creation of actual fish habitat.
15 x 12 x 24 feet
Public artwork commissioned for the Commuter Biennial, Miami

2019 Metal studs, fiberglass cast fish, hardware, pontoon work barge, fish habitat. 15 x 12 x 24 feet Public artwork commissioned for the Commuter Biennial, Miami, FL
moving the floating sculpture into place, across from the Miami airport, in the Blue Lagoon - and only viewable by commuters passing by on Highway 836

...a floating sculpture comprised of metal studs, typical of construction seen around Miami Dade, interspersed with writhing fish forms. The fish forms are reminiscent of what is commonly referred to as "ghost fish" – unintended bycatch in large-scale nets in the fishing industry – which is also typical of the Miami Dade region, though often left unseen in the offshore waters.
The work was only viewable by commuters from the 836 highway, across from the Miami airport, in the Blue Lagoon. Once on view for a few weeks, the sculpture was sunk to create actual fish habitat. It is now a substrate host for coral growth and a thriving fish habitat in the Blue Lagoon - a body of water often dredged, and thus void of habitat for the biodiverse fish populations living within it.

—Excerpted from the artist’s statement

location of installation, across from the Miami airport in the Blue Lagoon
the sinking of the sculpture, to act as an armature for coral growth and the development of a thriving fish habitat
sunken sculpture now acts as an armature for coral growth and a thriving fish habitat

2013

A Proverbial Machine in the Garden

Dynahoe tractor, concrete, earth, landscape, steel grating

See the documentary video

Reference: George Inness. The Lackawanna Valley. c. 1855
Preparatory drawings

The notion of a ‘machine in the garden’ is a cultural symbol that underlies the tension between the pastoral ideal and the rapid and sweeping transformations wrought by industrialized technology. Brooks’s work considers this on- going conflicted relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. Speaking to Storm King’s past—as an agricultural site— and present—as a carefully sculpted pastoral environment— A Proverbial Machine in the Garden addresses questions of how humans use, consume, and perceive of the natural world. Brooks’s piece is subterranean, and invisible from afar. It is designed to be experienced—as a natural landscape or topography would be—by viewers walking across it.

—Excerpted from the Storm King Art Center press release

Photographs by Jerry L. Thompson
Photograph by Jerry L. Thompson
The Storm King museum building and the sculpture itself sit atop manmade hills. Photographs by Jerry L. Thompson
Interpretive signage with aerial image of Storm King grounds from 1957, when it was still an active farm.

2010 – 2011

Preserved Forest

Nursery-grown trees, earth, concrete. Dimensions variable

Photograph by Cathy Carver
Photograph by Cathy Carver

One of the more unusual sights [during installations for MoMA P.S. 1’s Greater New York 2010 show] was a cement mixer outside. It was not there to smooth out the sidewalk or resurface P.S. 1’s courtyard, but to put the finishing touches on “Forest Preserved,” by the 34-year old artist David Brooks. Mr. Brooks stood in P.S. 1’s 26-foot-high duplex gallery, where concrete had just been dumped, pumped, and sprayed over a forest of trees trucked in from nurseries in Florida…The trees had been arranged to approximate an Amazonian rain forest. As the [cement] mixture was drying—and delicately encrusting the trees—the leaves began wilting, cast in a gray haze of heavy concrete…Mr. Brooks added that the work “will change every day as it decomposes.”

—Excerpted from The New York Times, “A Petrified Forest” by Carol Vogel, May 20, 2010

Preparatory drawing
| Photograph by Cathy Carver
Photograph by Cathy Carver
Photograph by Cathy Carver
Photograph by Cathy Carver
View of new canopy tree growth after one year of the installation

2011 – 2012

Desert Rooftops

Asphalt shingled rooftops, wood, vinyl siding, metal interpretive signs 16 x 92 x 54 feet

Desert Rooftops is a 5,000-square-foot sculpture that is an undulating configuration of multiple asphalt-shingled rooftops similar to those on suburban developments, McMansions and strip malls conjoined to resemble a roll- ing, dune-like landscape. The piece examines issues of the natural and built lands- cape by comparing the monoculture that arises from unchecked suburban and urban sprawl with that of an over-cultivated landscape—creating a work that is “picturesque, familiar and simultaneously foreboding.” Brooks’ sculptural approach gives a nod to Robert Smithson’s earthworks and Gordon Matta-Clark’s build- ing cuts while offering a much needed sense of humor to help digest today’s somber environmental issues.

—Excerpted from the Art Production Fund press release

Detail: interpretive signage, correlating processes of suburban sprawl with processes of desertification.
Stress Tests: Un-sites No. 1-2 & 3-5 (Homage to Gordon.) 2013 Extracted sections of the Desert Rooftops installation, cable, hardware. Dimensions variable. 2014 installation at the Tang Museum, Saratoga Springs, NY

2014

Crates, Blocks, and Mammals

Installation at Art Los Angeles Contemporary under the auspices of American Contemporary, NY

Installation View

David Brooks’ precariously stacked compositions are determined by the amount of material needed to mimic the exact weight of the animals they depict—the most critically endangered mammals on Earth. These sculptures will outlive the species they reference, rendering them veritable monuments to the unknown, and the soon to be lost. Like caged exotic animals on display—or readied for export—the sculptures are shown partially crated. The species name, average adult weight, and a graphic silhouette are stamped on the exterior of each crate. The works rely on the crate as a support structure, as it provides a sense of balance and structural scaffold for the weighty materials it contains. This strain, between chaos and order, is ever present in Brooks’ work, which speaks to the energy exerted in the ongoing main-tenance of the human relationship with the natural world.

—Excerpted from Crates, Blocks, and Mammals press release, 2014

Marble Blocks – 80lbs. – or Chaocoan Peccary (Bolivia.) 2014 80 pounds of Danby marble, stainless steel pins, MDF + wood crate, stencil paint, hardware, packing material. 27 x 33 x 18 inches
Aluminum Blocks – 331lbs. – or Baird’s Tapir (Central and South America.) 2014. 331 pounds of aluminum, stainless steel pins, wood slat crate, stencil paint, packing material, hardware. 54 x 36 x 30 inches
Details of: Aluminum Blocks – 331lbs. – or Baird’s Tapir (Central and South America.)
Marble Blocks – 70lbs. – or Hairy-nosed Wombat (Australia.) 2014 70 pounds of Verde Antique marble, stainless steel pins, wood crate, stencil paint, Tyvek, hardware, packing material. 24 x 28 x 18 inches
Aluminum Blocks – 127lbs. – or Yangtze River Dolphin (China.) 2014 127 pounds of aluminum, stainless steel pins, wood slat crate, stencil paint, hardware. 28 x 34 x 18 inches
Marble Blocks – 218lbs. – or Sumatran Orangutan (Indonesia.) 2014 218 pounds of Verde Antique marble, stainless steel pins, wood crate, stencil paint, Tyvek, hardware, packing material. 27 x 35 x 24 inches
Aluminum Blocks – 352lbs. – or Pygmy Hippopotamus (West Africa.) 2014 352 pounds of aluminum, stainless steel pins, wood slat crate, stencil paint, hardware. 39 x 60 x 34 inches
Marble Blocks – 280lbs. – or South China Tiger (China.) 2014 280 pounds of Danby marble, stainless steel pins, MDO + wood crate, stencil paint, hardware, packing material. 30 x 54 x 25 inches

2014

Myopic Wall Composition (with chainsaw-cut wood found at Walden Pond)

Chainsaw-cut wood found in historic Walden Woods, MDF, paint, metal scaffold

Walden Pond, October 2014; Northwest corner of Walden Pond with floating chainsaw-cut samples later collected.
(Top) Walden Pond State Reservation Plaque (Bottom) Chainsaw cut wood under rock pile at Walden

This piece contains chainsaw-cut and hand-hewn wood collected from Walden Pond State Reservation and historic Walden Woods. Thus, what appears to be a “natural” object is in fact an object formed by culture. Much like the “wilds” of Thoreau, the wilderness is not a place void of culture, but intimately intertwined with it, although not always visibly so. These irregular wooden forms are reduced to two- dimensional surfaces as they are embedded into museum- style walls. Yet the “back” of the walls reveal the elaborate scaffolding needed to support their precise locations, alluding to a rich world made invisible. The installation proposes a myopic or shortsighted perception of the natural world. This is indicative of a paradoxical sentimentality that simultaneously values land conservation, often fueled by texts like Walden, while jeopardizing the very same environment through rampant consumerism.

—Excerpted from the artist’s statement

Installation views and details

2009 – 2015

Gap Ecology (Three Still Lives with Cherry Picker and Palms)

60’ aerial boom lift, Majesty palms, weather. Dimensions Variable

Installation at Fischer Landau Center
Installation at Fischer Landau Center

In the Amazon, storms often result in the felling of towering canopy trees, ripping holes in the forest canopy and forming a “light gap.” This gap is quickly colonized by opportunistic species that capitalize on such improvisational events for rapid growth. This sculptural intervention makes an analogy between this phenomenon typical of rainforest ecology and that of urban light gaps in our sprawling built environ- ments—from dormant construction sites, rapid devel- opment, or natural disasters. These aerial boom lifts, or cherry pickers, behave as active and opportunistic species in the built environment.

—Excerpted from the artist’s project description

Gap Ecology: Still Life with Cherry Picker and Palms. 2009
Installation at Socrates Sculpture Park, 2013 on the occasion of Marfa Dialogues/NY
Installation along Queens Street on the occasion of Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2014
Installation along Queens Street on the occasion of Nuit Blanche, Toronto, 2014

2012

Notes on Structure

Imbroglios, heaps, and myopias

A Phylogenetic Tree (from Homo sapiens to Megalops atlanticus). 2012

In Notes On Structure, Brooks creates a sculptural representation of a phylogenetic tree — a branching diagram that indicates evolutionary relationships between biological entities, and their common ancestors. The phylogenetic tree here traces the evolutionary paths of humans and one of the world’s most sought after game fish — the Atlantic Tarpon — a fish with enigmatic migration routes, whose ancestors were some of the earliest predatory fish, and is able to breathe oxygen through an air bladder rather than gills.

The diagram is disrupted by the approximation of a school of fish writhing through it, defying their classification on the branching tree.

The notions of taxonomy and structure, by definition, are only able to provide a single perspective of the state of things. The wall constructions lining the back gallery function as portraits of such a conflicted notion of perception. The shortcomings in seeking the essence of things becomes subject matter and medium as Brooks capitalizes on these imbroglios to infuse process, motion, and adaptability back into the static structures that apparently define the world around us.

—Excerpted from the American Contemporary press release

Imbroglios (a phylogenetic tree, from Homo Sapiens to Megalops atlanticus). 2012
Installation view
Myopic Wall Composition (with twisted tree felled by thunderstorm and yellow-bellied sapsucker holes). 2012. MDF, wood, paint, metal scaffold
Myopic Wall Composition (with Pennsylvania Bluestone). 2012 MDF, Pennsylvania Bluestone, paint, metal scaffold.
Detail of lightning-struck log
Detail of yellow-bellied sapsucker holes (woodpecker)
Heap (with bobcat, coyote, and I-beam). 2012 Taxidermy animal forms, wood, industrial shrink-wrap, metal.

2011

Still Life with Stampede and Guano

Concrete animal forms that lived with wild birds, wild seabird guano, varnish. Dimensions Variable

Installation view

There is an inherent irony to these concrete faux beasts, whose ferocious poses stand frozen, tamed and shackled as the ultra-domestic ornaments of their masters’ lawns. Brooks placed these sculptures throughout the grounds of the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center to “live with” seabirds harmed as a result of contact with humans. Over time, the sculptures acquired a quasi-painterly patina of guano such that the simulated wild animals bear the indexical traces of real ones. The urgent, overall implication of this piece is of human- kind’s artificial sense of separation from nature. This sense can blind us to nature’s actual presence around us, including the wildlife that struggles to survive amid our urban environments.

—Excerpted from the exhibition wall text

Documentation of sculptures while installed at the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center, to live with rehabilitating wild seabirds and acquire a patina of guano on the faux bronze surface.
(Above) Documentation of sculptures installed at the Florida Keys Wild Bird Center to live with rehabilitating wild birds. (Below) Installation detail
Installation view
Installation Detail

2014

Repositioned Core

Rock core extracted from 5285 feet, metal scaffolding, modified architecture.

Core extractions in situ

Fossil fuel consumption produces numerous unexpected results, many of them troubling. When a petroleum company prospects for oil, an extraction of earth, called a core, is routinely done to determine the presence of hydrocarbons in that given area. However costly and irreplaceable the cores might be, oil companies have no reason to keep them once the viability of a particular well or reservoir has been established. The University of Texas at Austin, however, has amassed a vast repository of these oil industry cast-offs over decades. Before they were excavated, the stories buried within these stones lay dormant for 250 million years. Here this history is reactivated as the core transects the built environment of the gallery before plunging back to its subterranean origin.

—Excerpted from the installation’s wall text

Core being prepared and installed atop scaffolding in exhibition space
Installation views and details

2014

An Archive within an Archive within an Archive

Artist project for Issue no. 53 of Cabinet Magazine

At the Austin Core Research Center (CRC) of the University of Texas there is a hangar-sized warehouse containing an archive of more than two million core samples. The stories buried within these stones laid dormant for 250 million years before excavation. As samples were originally collected and shuttled from one lab to another in glass vials, there was a risk that the movement would agitate the sediments and break the vials. One obvious solution to the problem of excessive rattling was to simply stuff the day’s newspaper into each drawer. By doing so, a third archive was incidentally amassed, offering accounts of the topical and quotidian goings-on of the day. Spanning news between the wars and after, this archive also laid dormant until a group of art students from the University of Texas at Austin accompanied me in February 2014 to reawaken these artifacts of a bygone era.

—Excerpted from the artist’s text in Cabinet Magazine

2017

Of Discriminating Artistic Feeling (The Appropriator, The Industrialist, and The Aesthete and Socialite)

Animal cages designed for the two macaws, two pair of monkeys and owl that James Deering kept at Vizcaya as personal companions – whose respective designs are emblematic of Deering’s own character qualities: as an appropriator, an industrialist, and an aesthete and socialite.

Sketch for The Appropriator
The Appropriator Macaw cage made from cypress, mahogany, fish poison, white oak, caning, hardware. In collaboration with Brian Booth.
Detail, The Appropriator

Of Discriminating Artistic Feeling consists of three animal enclosures displayed throughout Vizcaya, in areas that might have originally housed James Deering’s birds and monkeys. Brooks highlights the distinctly nonhuman presence these residents contributed to the estate, and how their habitats and sounds added to the overall immersive experience of Vizcaya.

In addition to housing James Deering’s two macaws, four monkeys and one owl, the unique cage designs are each emblematic of Deering himself––one conveying his identity as an early 20th Century industrialist, one that regards his disposition as an aesthete and socialite, and the third which enacts his delectation as an appropriator of many architectural and artistic styles. The last was made in collaboration with artist and woodworker of South Florida renown, Brian Booth.

The cages, as if succumbing to their own affectations overwrought with their respective design motifs, are ultimately rendered uninhabitable due to their very own sensory overload.

—Excerpted from the Vizcaya Museum’s press release

Paul Chalfin’s 1919 architectural drawings of unrealized cage designs for James Deering.
The Aesthete and Socialite Monkey habitat of milled aluminum based on Paul Chalfin’s 1919 architectural drawings of unrealized cage designs for James Deering, stainless steel hardware.
Detail, The Aesthete and the Socialite
The Industrialist Owl cage made from galvanized HVAC ducts and aluminum pallet with brass, steel and copper hardware
Detail, The Industrialist

2017

Case Study: Weld County, CO

3D scans and FDM 3D prints from corn-based plastic mixed with wood fibers.

Aerial view of Weld County, CO with active fracking well pads dotting the landscape, interwoven amongst a burgeoning suburban sprawl, with off-gassing well pads as close as 48 feet to occupied residences.
Pedestrian views of Weld County, CO highlighting the close proximity of oil and gas infrastructure to occupied residential neighborhoods.
Image scans from a pedestrian’s viewpoint. This restricted scanning process presented anomalies within the modeling program forcing the software to unpredictably supplement or omit information to assemble 3D models.

Weld County arguably has the densest number of active fracking wells in the country. A map illustrating the underground network of active gas extraction lines reveals a sprawling, tightly-knit mesh of export pipelines sitting just below the playgrounds, carpeted living rooms and manicured front lawns. Here, the domestic and the everyday come in intimate proximity to the inhuman-scaled industries of resource extraction.

Case Study: Weld County, CO consists of re-assembled 3D prints of real homes, all lying within one hundred feet of active fracking well pads. Image scans were taken only from what was observable from a pedestrian’s point of view, from roads or sidewalks. This restricted approach to the scanning process presented anomalies within the modeling program. When the scans were assembled to form a 3D model, the software unpredictably supplemented missing information or omitted existing information.

Such deformations make evident the disconnect between our actions and how we perceive them. This exhibition looks at how we normalize our impact on the natural world and the perceived consequences to our own health.

—Excerpted from the artist’s statement

Installation view of re-assembled wood-fibrous 3D prints of real homes all lying within one hundred feet of active fracking well pads.
Coal Mine Street, 2017 FDM 3D print from corn-based plastic with wood fibers, bar clamps, steel sawhorses, hardware.
Scenic Avenue, 2017 FDM 3D print from corn-based plastic with wood fibers, bar clamps, steel sawhorses, hardware.
Scenic Avenue, 2017
Twilight Avenue, 2017 FDM 3D print from corn-based plastic with wood fibers, bar clamps, steel sawhorses, hardware.
Twilight Avenue, 2017.
Mountain Shadows Boulevard and Cimmarron Street (well pad), 2017 FDM 3D print from corn-based plastic with wood fibers, bar clamps, steel sawhorses, hardware.
Ebony Street, 2017 FDM 3D print from corn-based plastic with wood fibers, bar clamps, steel sawhorses, hardware.

2010

Trophic Pyramids (and their Producers)

Casts of steps from homes destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans. Concrete, metal 84 x 144 x 72 inches

Schematic collage + print edition of documented steps from homes destroyed in Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and a trophic pyramid illustrating the hierarchies within a food chain. 32 x 24 inches, each

All that remains of hundreds of previously existing New Orleans wooden Creole cottages are the front steps leading up to the air-space where the house once was. The steps are steeped with formidable histories — the residual conglomeration of generations of events and hierarchies that shaped the environment as the environment has shaped the people. This installation consists of various front steps that I documented in several of the evacuated neighborhoods of New Orleans. Each set of idiosyncratic steps becomes a readymade sculpture, or monument, that acts as a beacon for this convoluted social and natural history.

The steps’ pyramidal form evokes a “trophic pyramid,” a graphic form used to represent energy’s movement through an ecosystem. This project likens the hierarchy of an ecosystem’s flow, satirically, to the social history of New Orleans and its own dubious and unrelenting hierarchies.

—Excerpted from the artist’s project statement

2009 – 2010

Naturae Vulgaris

Concrete sidewalk, ficus benjamina, metal gantry cranes, hoisting equipment. 144 x 744 x 108 inches (approx.)

Schematic collages
Fabrication documentation

The production of cement is one of the primary producers of carbon dioxide, producing nearly one tenth of worldwide CO2 emissions per year. If one considers how harmful the production and application of concrete is to the larger body of our environment, one would need to be psychotic to live in approval of its use. From a macroscopic perspective, it is nothing short of suicidal. And yet it is the very physical foundation of all extant urban infrastructures; it is the material of our dwelling, and sustains our way of life. With some poetic license, one could see concrete as indicative of a larger existential impasse, highlighting the colossal scale of energy we exert to maintain such a delusional image of normalcy.

—Artist’s quote excerpted from Museum 52 press release

2013

Daniel Maier-Reimer, walk following the Florence city boundary line, presented by David Brooks

Aluminum, seamless nettle fabric, hardware, framed photograph of the outskirts of Florence.

Daniel Maier-Reimer roams unknown, mostly uninhabited territories in urban and rural areas along cartographically-fixed outlines of cities and landscapes. His photographs capture what was seen only as a representation of the subjective experience of space and time. The photographs taken during a walk along the Florence city limits present a close-up view of a landscape: a place that could be everywhere and nowhere. For his solo exhibition at Clages, Daniel Maier-Reimer invited American artist David Brooks to develop a vis- ualization of this hike. The space within a space is man- ifested as a walk-in structure; it is only once we are inside that we notice its contours follow the same path as those marked on the map. It is only inside of it that we can decipher the path taken.

—Excerpted from Vanessa Joan Müller, Kunsthalle Vienna

Photograph by Anne Pöhlmann
Photograph by Anne Pöhlmann
Photograph by Anne Pöhlmann
Photograph by Anne Pöhlmann
Exterior view of installation at Clages, Cologne, Germany. Photograph by Anne Pöhlmann

2011

Pareidolia: When Flags Become Clouds and Clouds Become Fish

Dye sublimation print on jet-flag fabric, grommets.

Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon by which an illusion involving a vague image is perceived as something clear and distinct (e.g. cloud forms in the shape of fish). The natural world has long been the incessant receiver of pareidolic vision—a backdrop for projecting our ever changing desires and fears. Despite the claims of science, according to our hardwired pareidolic tendencies "nature" can only be known as a reflection of our personal needs, consumptions and ideas.

—Excerpted from the artist’s project statement, 2011

Installation view from museum gardens
Installation view from rooftop
Installation view from upper street level

2009

Assisted Boardwalk (with American Lindens, Black Honey Locusts, Silver Maple, River Birch and Willows)

Reclaimed lumber, hardware, existing trees Dimensions variable

Drawing for Assisted Boardwalk (with American Lindens, Black Honey Locusts, Silver Maple, River Birch and Willows). 2009

2008

Quick Millions

Metal structural studs, gypsum board, flood lights, electrical wiring, paint, modified architecture.

Aerial view of the Urban Development Boundary Line separating Miami from the Florida Everglades
Schematic view of installation layout in Museum 52

Brooks’ project dramatically re-figures the sobering white space into organic chaos. Dozens of sheetrock columns virally sprout from the floor like forest sprawl. For Brooks, quick millions are found in abrupt ecological change and land development, in population growth, the bar-chart ascent of office towers and the arterial thrusts of roads through the Amazon. From global markets to microbes, Brooks draws from a nebulous tangle where mergers and acquisitions analogously shape the natural world.

Hastily constructed columns at varying degrees of completion are partially demolished, torn open with floodlights ablaze in the rubble. The bulbs simultaneously destroy, adorn and illuminate, leaving the rubble saturated with light, imprinting traces of the work on the retinal memory…inciting ghosts of evolutionary millennia razed in our clear-cut forests, and the ensuing ruins of buildings built on speculation.

Quick Millions employs the dynamic of entropy, as explored by artist Robert Smithson, from whose 1965 sculpture Brooks takes his title. But whereas Smithson conceived of entropic form on a geological time-scale, Brooks accelerates the notion and treats entropy on a viscerally human time-scale, of years, months, days and minutes.

—Excerpt from exhibition press release

Installation View

2012

Picnic Grove

Douglas fir, hardware, Silver birch trees. Dimensions Variable

(Below) Existing site indicating newly constructed picnic tables, chairs and planted saplings

Picnic Grove is a work built out of custom-made outdoor wooden furniture and spread over the entire 18,000m of the Deer Hut Field at Cass Sculpture Foundation. The 34 picnic tables and garden chairs are construct- ed in an interlocking manner, with trees heedlessly growing through the furniture like opportunistic weeds. As the picnic tables traverse the field and impose themselves on the landscape, the trees perforate the structures like a verdant grove, creating ambiguity as to which is dominant. While visitors are encouraged to utilize the install- ation for communal enjoyment, they will also find themselves negotiating the playful interruptions created by the erratic placement of the trees, fostering a similar sense of ambiguity as to who is imposing on whom.

—Excerpted from the Cass Sculpture Foundation press release

2012

Sketch of a Blue Whale (Enlarged to Scale: 23 meters, 154 tons)

Polished stainless steel tubing, used galvanized steel scaffolding, hardware 18,104 x 18,108 x 3000 mm

Comparison between whale scale and human scale
Measuring over 110’ long, Blue Whales are the largest animals to have ever roamed the face of the planet

In the earth’s 3 billion year history of cellular life, the blue whale is the largest animal ever known to have roamed its surface, and it coexists with us still to this day.The whale is a scale of life that competes with the scale of our own infrastructures. Considering our ability to lord dominion over all life, the blue whale, in its dwarfing scale, places our individual relationship to the natural environment back into a perspective of humbled celebration. In this piece, the confluence of different scales simul- taneously (between the hand drawn, the sculptural, and the monumental size of a real blue whale, as well as the surrounding landscape) points to an immediate relationship between the viewers themselves and the reality of the natural world just beyond our front doors.

—Excerpted from the Cass Sculpture Foundation press release

(Top) Sketch of a blue whale – 5x7 inches (Bottom) Sketch enlarged schematically to 23 meters, the full size of an average adult
Stainless steel tubing, used for fencing and railing around pools and nautical equipment. This 3” diameter polished stainless steel tubing is used to render the outline of the sketch of a blue whale.

2015 – 2016

A Day in the Life of the Coral (As Seen at Brewster Reef)

Imagery taken during three days at the reef, wood billboard construction, hardware. 12 x 40 x 40 feet

Thomas Gainsborough, "A Landscape in Suffolk," 1748

On the occasion of this public commission Brooks spent a consecutive number of days documenting portions of the barrier and patch reefs in close proximity to Museum Park in downtown Miami. Through the use of large layered billboards that post the daily goings-on of the reefs Brooks visited, he treats the billboard as a journalistic device. Here the monumentally-scaled imagery depicts evidence of coral’s now common bleaching phases due to deterioration in water quality and intensified warming—alongside their formal beauty and dwindling biodiversity from human impact. The billboards might appear to the viewer as incomplete or damaged, as large circular areas of the structure have been extracted. The deleterious impact the circular cutouts are analogous to the stresses society imposes upon other life within our environs.

—Excerpted from interpretive sign text

Below: Location of three billboards with sight lines.
Onsite installation in Museum Park, Miami, FL
(Below) Detail looking through all three billboards towards Brewster Reef, where the billboard images were taken

2010

Terra Incognita—Rainforest Canopy (Cronos Version) Partially Buried Boardwalk (with Observation Tower)

Cargo containers, tropical canopy trees, irrigation system. Dimensions Variable Reclaimed lumber, gravel, hardware. Dimensions Variable Installation at Sculpture Center

Terra Incognita (Forest Canopy). 2010. Schematic collage, paper, adhesive. 11” x 17”
Installation
Installation view at Sculpture Center, NY

2007 – Present

Other Selected Works

Entangled Image (Short-beaked common dolphins). 2013
Entangled Image (Parasitic jaeger). 2014
Entangled Image (Humpback whale). 2013
Entangled Image (Elegant terns). 2014
Ecuador and its Dogs by David Brooks
Ecuador and its Dogs by David Brooks
Myopic Wall Composition (with reclaimed mantel and bluestone). 2013
Myopic Wall Composition (with reclaimed mantel and bluestone) 2013
Turle stop. 2010
InterOceanica Highway, Peru>Brazil. 2011 Images from a journey across the InterOceanic highway construction – the world’s largest road building project linking the Pacific with the Atlantic by traversing the Amazon Basin.
InterOceanica Highway, Peru>Brazil. 2011. Dye sublimation prints on vinyl, grommets, wood crates shipped over the Atlantic Ocean, hardware, paint. Dimensions variable. Installation in Bad Tölz, Germany
Adjustable Sculpture with Sailfish. 2011 Aluminum ladder, wood, clamps, altered sailfish mount, enamel paint 96 x 108 x 84 inches
Adjustable Sculpture with Sailfish. 2011
Three Dune Formations. 2012 Wood, asphalt shingles, aluminum drip edge, hardware 48 x 112 x 56.5 inches
Balcony with Landscape and View. 2010 Steel, oak tree form regional countryside, sisal rope, hardware 114 x 54 x 48 inches
Balcony with Landscape and View. 2010
Balcony with Landscape and View. 2010
Upside Down Boardwalk. 2009 Pressure treated lumber, hardware 96 x 65 x 120 inches
Upside Down Boardwalk. 2009
Adaptable Boardwalk (with three genetic drifts). 2011 Lumber, hardware, forklifts, London Plantetrees 18 x 90 x 60 feet (approx.) Installation at Bold Tendencies 5, London
Adaptable Boardwalk (with three genetic drifts). 2011
Adaptable Boardwalk (with three genetic drifts). 2011
Unfinished Section of Sidewalk with Palms. 2008 Concrete, rebar and palms
Cut, Clear, Pave, Sell (repeat). 2010 De-commissioned telephone poles, forklift, ratcheting belt clamps 10 x 6 x 11.5 feet. Installation at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Cut, Clear, Pave, Sell (repeat). 2010
Cut, Clear, Pave, Sell (repeat). 2010
Residual Sculpture with Tracks. 2011 Lightweight concrete, perlite, wire lath
Graphite Dolmen Site. 2007 Siliciclistic rock, graphite, wax 66 x 42 x 54 inches. Installation at D’Amelio Terras Gallery
Graphite Dolmen Site. 2007
Pond House Pond. 2009 – 2012 A project to design and build a pond and amphibious pond house; in collaboration with Mark Dion, J. Morgan Puett, Mark Thomann, and Natalie Jeremijenko. Mildred’s Lane Historical Society, Beach Lake, PA
Six Dozen Eggs, Concrete, Rebar. 2009 Six dozen eggs, concrete, rebar 32 x 18 x 18 inches

1997–Present

Field Work

Biodiversity Survey of the Western Guiana Shield: Part III of a Three-Part Survey of South American Highlands: Guyana, 2016

Since 2005, I've worked with a team of biologists on numerous expeditions to complete biotic surveys in the Amazon regions of the Brazo Casiquiare in Venezuela, the Acre in Brazil, the Cordillera del Condor in Ecuador, the Madre de Dios and the Marañón River in Peru, as well as the Amazonian sister system of the Upper Ireng in Guyana. All of these expeditions were extremely productive in the description of dozens of new species (species not yet known to science), expanded the known range of a number of bird species, and yielded a yet unknown number of subspecies as a well contributions to herpetology.

However, the human impacts on these seemingly remote areas of the Amazon were overwhelming exasperating and humbling. They galvanized a worldview stubbornly caught within a distraught network of global economics, cultural wants and social ills, as well as an immanent ecological apocalypse that are all being brought to an accelerated confrontation and an accelerated entropy. From the position of a cultural producer, it is imperative that this accelerated entropy be documented, articulated and challenged within the cultural sphere, as its roots are ultimately ideological in origin.

Biodiversity Survey of the Western Guiana Shield: Part III of a Three-Part Survey of South American Highlands Guyana, 2016
Biodiversity Survey of the Western Guiana Shield: Part III of a Three-Part Survey of South American Highlands Guyana, 2016
Florida Keys – Fish and Bird Census
Tropical Audubon Society, Annual Census Counts: Florida Everglades, 1999 – Present
Florida Keys and Everglades National Park census
Aquatic Biodiversity Survey of the Southern Peruvian Amazon Peru, 2010
(Top) Planetary Biodiversity Inventory: All Catfish Species Inventory, Amazon Basin Expedition: Venezuela 2005 (Bottom) Aquatic Biodiversity Survey of the Southern Peruvian Amazon: Peru, 2010
(Top) Biodiversity Survey of the Western Guiana Shield: Part III of a Three-Part Survey of South American Highlands, Guyana, 2016 (Bottom) Aquatic Biodiversity Survey of the Southern Ecuadorian Amazon: Ecuador, 2012
Aquatic Biodiversity Survey of the Southern Peruvian Amazon: Peru, 2010
(Top) Biodiversity Survey of the Western Guiana Shield: Part III of a Three-Part Survey of South American Highlands: Guyana, 2016 (Bottom) Aquatic Biodiversity Survey of the Southern Ecuadorian Amazon: Ecuador, 2012
(Top) Museo de Historia Natural Javier Prado, Lima, Peru – collections (Bottom) Field Work: Madre de Dios, Peru
(Top) Field Work: Madre de Dios, Peru (Bottom) Henri Pittier, Venezuela – Bird count observation
(Top) Museo de Historia Natural Javier Prado, Lima, Peru – collections