CURRENT: I Read Somewhere that Mountains Anchor the Land John Brooks

March 22nd-May 3rd, 2025

Opening Reception: Saturday, March 22nd, 6-9p

Closing Reception: Friday, April 25th, 6-9p

houseguest is pleased to announce I Read Somewhere that Mountains Anchor the Land, a solo exhibition of experimental, playful, and meandering life size figure drawings by artist and poet John Brooks (Los Angeles, California). Found during a visit to Brooks’ studio right before his move to LA in the summer of 2024, this installation recalls the incidental charms and wondrous pleasures of friends visiting friends in their studio. With this, we are given a quiet look into an artists’ burgeoning practice. Made in the 2010’s, prior to his success as a painter, drawer, and poet; these sculptures explore a vulnerability in physicality that mirror the same emotional tenderness and awareness present in his later works on canvas and paper. Cardboard portraits appear here as exploratory, adventurous, and considerate ruminations. In these early works, we see the evolving hand of an artist finding their voice: the early sketch, the working through space, and the memorialized narration so present in Brooks’ oeuvre, the historicization of every figure, and of course: the poodle. 

Houseguest will also be offering a small zine of Brooks’ poetry, available for preorder at the opening reception, and available for pickup on March 29th.

Read more on the artist below.

Visual artist and poet John Brooks explores themes of Queer identity, memory, death, and place; his work is centered around questions of contemplation, the expression of emotion, the transformative power and the emotional resonance of particular experiences and what Max Beckmann described as “the deepest feeling about the mystery of being.”

Informed by collage, his paintings are created by combining images from disparate sources: art history, cinema, literature, music, pop culture, and his personal life. Brimming with the richness of the human experience, the resulting tableau feels paradoxically familiar and entirely new, reflecting both the zeitgeist and what came before. Charged with a sense of longing, remote desire, empathy, as well as a kind of existential openness, the paintings champion the importance of connection, engagement, and presentness. 

Part portraiture, part observation, and partly an effort to compile an archive of his ever-expanding global Queer community, Brooks’ drawing practice has blossomed in the last few years. Conceptually aligned with his paintings but aesthetically distinct due to the nature of material differences, these works celebrate individuality, intimacy, tenderness, the autonomy of the self, the tension between confidence and vulnerability, as well as the joy of direct mark-making. 

Born in central Kentucky in 1978, Brooks studied political science and English literature at the College of Charleston, South Carolina. Hiso work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and is held in the collections of Speed Art Museum, Grinnell College Museum of Art, The University of Kentucky Medical Center, OZ Arts, 21C, Beth  Rudin DeWoody / The Bunker, and numerous other private collections. The New Yorker, Texte Zur Kunst, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and Action, Spectacle have published his paintings and drawings. Brooks operated Quappi Projects, a contemporary art gallery focusing on exhibiting work reflecting the zeitgeist, where he curated over twenty-five exhibitions. 

“Brooks’s historical borrowings are all haunted by the present. His invocations of the aesthetic and erotic freedom of the twenties in Berlin are shadowed by our knowledge of the decades that followed, and by our awareness of the fragility of progress.”

–Garth Greenwell, The New Yorker (2021)