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)

FOOL’S GOLD HANNAH SMITH

January 25th, 2025 - March 1st, 2025

houseguest is excited to share its first exhibition after a year-long hiatus: Fool’s Gold, a solo exhibition with new work by Lexington based interdisciplinary artist and educator, Hannah Smith. The exhibition will run from January 18th - March 1st, 2025, with an opening reception on Saturday January 11th from 6-9p.

Artist Statement

I am a Kentucky-based artist who creates sculptures and installations that merge Pop Art references and assemblage strategies with a rebellious punk attitude. Employing recognizable imagery and unconventional materials, I have developed a playful and unpretentious art practice that offers a complex vision of society, in which blue-collar aesthetics embody political and social ideologies of discontent. I am interested in presenting a vision of middle America that exposes the ways in which capitalism exploits our very basic humanness. In doing so, I unveil the often unseen violence within power; power that shapes and confines our self-perception, that commodifies our love, desire, dreams, our most essential human nature; powers that are only escapable if the price is right. My sculptures take the form of empty fast-food baskets, oversized ornamental tassels that spin erratically, and miniaturized signs illuminating seedy motels -- abstracted versions of low-cost and accessible commodities that saturate our everyday surroundings. Look past their blinking lights and metallic veneer, and you’ll observe symbols of the underlying aggression and violence accompanying the failure of the American Dream for a substantial sector of the working population for whom social mobility remains elusive. This affect is often the consequence of abuse of power, societal expectations, and perception of norms; and I explore this sentiment through miniature landscapes, abstracted commercial signage, and fictional machines. I insert the spirit of social unrest into my practice and my sculptural collages. Though subversively humorous,  they capture the tension inherent in the inextricable intertwining of class, power, and human desire. 

Artist Bio

Hannah Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Lexington, KY. They are a Lecturer at the University of Kentucky in Digital Design and 3D Fabrication and are an instructor of printmaking at the Kentucky Governor’s School for the Arts. Smith’s most recent solo exhibition in January 2024, Homestyle, was curated by Leah Kolb at 2nd Story in Lexington, KY which included works purchased by the UK Art Museum to be shown alongside Sol and Eva LeWitt in the exhibition; Floor, Wall, Outlet: Sculpture and Works on Paper, currently on view. In 2022, their work was awarded a Future Art Award from Mozaik Philanthropy, and they were commissioned to create an installation entitled, Big Gulp for the Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft Triennial. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the QRTC, Athens, Greece (2022); Sculptors Alliance, New York, NY (2021); 48-Stunden Neukölln Biennale, Berlin, Germany (2020); and the CICA Museum Seoul, South Korea (2019) among others.

“If the image screen is deemed intact, the attack on it might well possess a transgressive value. However, if it is thought to be already torn, then such transgression is almost beside the point, and this old vocation of the avant-garde is at an end. But there is a third option, and that is to reformulate this vocation, to rethink transgression not as a rupture produced by a heroic avant-garde posited somehow outside he symbolic order but as a fracture traced by a strategic avant-garde inside this order. In this view, the goal of the avant-garde is not to break with the symbolic order absolutely (the dream of absolute transgression is dispelled) but to reveal it in crisis—to register the points at which new possibilities are opened up by this very crisis.”

Hal Foster, Bad New Days: Art Criticism, Emergency. Verso. 2017