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David Brooks

Death Mask for Landscape, 2022-ongoing

Aluminum Casts

Since 2005, David Brooks has participated in several biodiversity survey expeditions throughout the Amazon basin. He began using a drone in recent years to 3D scan sections of the lowland Amazon forest threatened by logging, fossil fuel industries, and mining. These drone scans record the last moments of these forests' existences. From the scans, he made 3D prints and from those, aluminum casts were poured. Like the centuries-old tradition of death masks taken from the recently deceased, these aluminum castings are literal impressions of forest sections that are no longer living.

Visitors look down at the Death Mask for Landscape castings as one would see these forests from the distancing effects of Google Earth. The digitized rendering of forest cover remains visible in the aluminum castings, the residual effect of an algorithmic capture of a uniquely organic forest body, challenging the technological dependence by which we view the biosphere.

Death Mask for Landscape anticipates an audience in a distant future. The GPS coordinates of each razed site are indelibly stamped onto the surface of the aluminum casts, allowing a future generation to see what once lived at these precise locations. From this, the work seeks to give a sense of agency to those most intimately impacted by extractive industries.