David Brooks '09 in Two Exhibits

Alumnus David Brooks ’09 has artwork in two shows, one of which includes artwork by fellow Columbia visual artist, Mentor Mark Dion.

Melissa Feldman of The Storefront in Bellport, Long Island presents In the ever changing world in which we live…. Curator Maureen Mahony invited sixteen artists to create or submit work related to environmental changes, particularly climate change.

For this show, Brooks shares “X-Ray Scroll” (2020) a 40-foot long scroll consisting of the 862 x-rays he made of 1,547 fish collected by scientist Richard Vari. Vari, in a single day in 1982, had collected over a hundred species from the protected habitat of Cerro Duida in the Venezuelan Amazon. The gallery states, “Intimating a river, the scroll not only depicts the immense biodiversity capable of thriving in such a place but also the impossibility of ever totalizing an area’s entire species. The hubris of collecting has led to much negative impact upon the natural world.” Brooks accessed these works through the Smithsonian, where he received an artist’s research fellowship.

Described by the gallery’s press release as “the natural history museum satirist,” Dion contributes “The Collector in Repose” (2016), which shows a sleeping squirrel at rest amongst its belongings. “The drive to ceaselessly acquire material possessions ultimately amounts to nothing more than a bucket load of stuff in which one expires. Appropriating archaeological methods of collecting, cataloguing and exhibiting objects, Dion’s work questions the authority of institutions to inform environmental policy.”

In the ever changing world in which we live… runs through September 12. The Storefront in Bellport, NY is open Wednesday to Saturday and by appointment.

Brooks also has work in the Rubell Museum in Miami, for the museum’s Inaugural Exhibition at their new campus. The show draws from the museum’s collection at hand, and is described by the museum as “one of the most far-ranging museum exhibitions of contemporary art ever presented.” Brooks’s installation “Still Life with Herd and Guano” (2011) shows fiberglass animal forms that lived with wild seabirds, made of guano and sealing varnish.

“For more than 50 years we have been on an incredible mission: searching for new art and art that has been overlooked. Now, with the opening of the new Rubell Museum, we will be able to share the remarkable range of art we fell in love with along the way,” stated Mera Rubell.

The show, which opened last year, runs through November 2020.

Brooks (b. 1975 Brazil, Indiana) is an artist whose work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. His work investigates how cultural concerns cannot be divorced from the natural world, while also questioning the terms under which nature is perceived and utilized.

Dion was born in 1961 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. He initially studied in 1981-2 at the Hartford Art School of the University of Hartford in Connecticut, which awarded him a BFA (1986) and honorary doctorate in 2002. From 1983 to 1984 he attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and then the prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program (1984-1985). He is an Honorary Fellow of Falmouth University in the UK (2014), and has an Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters (Ph.D.) from The Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia (2015).