Ellen Brooks,
Trees/Leaves
Invitational exhibition
On view October 8 – December 23, 2022
GRound floor galleries
Hang
Ellen Brooks inaugurates an intimate gallery space by suspending over 30 feet of scrolls of film negatives from the ceiling. The artist hangs transparencies and negatives in all formats and from clips attached to the ceiling, mimicking the practice of film photography. Hanging negatives reference the surrounding natural landscaping, evoking a cascading waterfall with coils of film collecting on the ground floor gallery.
Trees 1987/2022 / Leaves 2022
Brooks, a photographer known for her boundary-pushing forays into sculpture, exhibited in the Main Street facing galleries on CAS’s ground floor. Brooks showed historical and new works from her Trees 1987/2022, body of work. The photographs reference each other, addressing mediated nature becoming distressed nature. In doing so, she explores the relationship between nature and culture through photographing found formal gardens, trees, bonsai trees. In this formal process, she removes a subject from its point of origin in nature, rephotographing each through a screen until it appears at once seductive, generalized, and deliberately contrived. Through a process of transformation, the artist calls attention to society's manipulation and reordering of nature, thereby raising important ecological questions.
Installation photographs by Zach Hyman.
About the Artist
Ellen Brooks began her studies in sculpture and photography at the University of Wisconsin in Madison but completed her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1968. Brooks also earned her MA in 1970 and her MFA in 1971 from the same school. She began her career on the West Coast, and is associated with the Los Angeles-based art community of the late 1960s and ‘70s. In 1982 she moved to New York, where her practice has since been based. Brooks has shown at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Centre Pompidou, and has work in the permanent collections of the MoMA, the Whitney, the National Museum of American Art, the Getty Museum, and others. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Livingston Manor, NY.
