Islands Are Not Forever, a series of large-scale drawings that are installed as an immersive environment, holds a mirror to the bewildering complexities of collective and personal queer histories. Brooks’s drawings create a panoramic landscape inhabited by historical and pop culture icons, film stars, artists, and friends, adorned with personal and cultural motifs, locales, and artistic innuendos.
His subjects are arranged in an ongoing stream of recollection that shades from forceful to dreamlike. Some figures demand attention in confronting postures; others drift softly upon the paper, the way an image might be summoned from subconsciousness. Collectively the drawings address the notion of “Queer Time”—an idea among some aestheticians and philosophers that suggests that any deviation from historical or individual linearity is somehow queer.
