ADAM BROOKS
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Many of Brooks’s works, through single words etched or stenciled onto sheets of glass or mirrors, demonstrate the fragility and ultimate failure of language as a communicative device. The shared precariousness of glass and communication–both are easily shattered–is so literal and direct that the metaphor risks slipping into cliche. But Brooks transcends the danger by adding, with appealing formal elegance, references to the human body. Unflect no. 2, for instance, consists of 36 sandblasted rectangular mirrors spread across three adjacent walls. A different “un” word has been traced through the layer of pale dust covering each piece. As we read through the litany of negativity–“unimaginative,” “unrepentant,” “untenable,” “uneasy”–the words and portions of our own reflected image materialize and vanish as we change position relative to the mirrors. At nonreflective angles, the rectangles take on a handsome minimalist, almost corporate look. Unflect no. 2 presents language as a fragmenting and alienating mediator of human experience. Seeing bits of our own reflection reminds us that we are not just victims of linguistic manipulation but perpetrators as well. We all use words every day not only to express ourselves but to advance our private goals.
In other pieces Brooks combines words with three-dimensional, body-referencing objects like cocktail glasses, soup labels, and hand-soap dispensers. Because they link intangible linguistic meaning with concrete human physicality, these works are the most satisfying in the show. In a display window facing the street, several shelves holding glass objects have been arranged in Crate & Barrel fashion, each shelf containing multiples of a single glass item. There is a shelf of martini glasses, a shelf of wine carafes, and so on. The repetition of transparency and form produces a symmetry that seduces and flatters the viewer/buyer. These attractive “goods” are meant to beautify our dinner tables, impress our friends, and help quench our various appetites. But the artist makes us pay for this visual flattery through the provocative words sandblasted onto the surface of the objects. Most powerful is the group of carafes, called Secrete Set. We usually identify a carafe’s primary function as dispensing wine or another beverage, but these carafes are labeled with words like “urinate,” “defecate,” “ejaculate,” and “menstruate.” Because bodily secretions are often tested for harmful “cultures,” here the carafes seem transformed into specimen jars. The artist makes the connection between physical and cultural disease with impressive simplicity.
