The Forest (A Floresta)

Brooks Dierdorff (b. 1985 Redlands, CA) is an artist exploring the ways media like photography and video shape our cultural imagination of environmental collapse. His work includes a range of methodologies such as photo-based sculptures, installation, video, appropriating images from commercial and archival sources, and environmental grief therapy. This expanded photographic practice often explores new ways of seeing - staging encounters with photographs that challenge their status as neutral documents. His most recent work examines the significance of the emerging “Rights of Nature” movement and what it represents politically, culturally, and philosophically. His work serves as an interface between political, ecological, and artistic spheres.

He has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally at galleries that include Amos Eno in Brooklyn, New York; The Los Angeles Center for Digital Art; The Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle; High Desert Test Sites in Joshua Tree, California; The Florida Prize in Contemporary Art at The Orlando Museum of Art; Johalla Projects in Chicago; the Ulrike Hamm Gallery in Bissendorf, Germany; the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in South Korea; and The New Gallery in Calgary, Canada.

His work has been written about in The New Yorker, The Daily Mail, Lenscratch, Feature Shoot, Aint-Bad, and the Orlando Sentinel among others. His work has been collected by the Nevada Museum of Art, the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art.

Brooks received his BA from the University of California, San Diego in 2007 and his MFA from the University of Oregon in 2012. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Photography at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida.