David Brooks creates large-scale, often site-specific works that address questions of how humans use, consume, and perceive the natural world. Brooks’s work refers to the artists of the generation before him who developed Land Art using natural locations and materials as their medium. Deeply invested in the cultural issues and practices of environmental preservation, Brooks has pursued fieldwork in South Florida and the Amazon rainforest, two environmentally rich sites seriously threatened by accelerated human intrusion. “For Brooks, the insistently multidisciplinary approach of science—which takes into consideration a complex and intersecting set of geologic, ecologic, cultural, and economic factors—is not just a model for his own artistic practice but a way of creating a more ‘robust personal worldview.’”

In 2011, Brooks teamed with New York’s Art Production Fund to create Desert Rooftops, a site-specific installation in the last undeveloped lot in Times Square. The installation consisted of a series of to-scale rooftops modeled after those on residential homes and constructed with the same materials and techniques, but appearing to be sunken into the ground. The work links suburban sprawl to the environmental problem of desertification, a process of land degredation in which fertile land is reduced to desert.

From the exhibition: One Work (January 25 – June 1, 2014)