Islands Are Not Forever

INDEPENDENT with Diane Rosenstein

May 14 - 17, 2026

Pier 36

New York, New York

Diane Rosenstein Gallery will present Islands Are Not Forever – an installation of drawings by John Brooks (b. 1978), an artist, poet, curator and writer based in Los Angeles. Planned as an expanding narrative, Brooks’ large scale series unites objects and figures from recent and ancient history in an epic work that speaks to cultural, architectural, sexual, intellectual and emotional erasure. Informed by collage and photography, Brooks creates images drawn from art history, cinema, literature, music pop culture, and importantly, his own life.

“The genesis of Islands Are Not Forever occurred, appropriately, in Venice, where I had traveled for the 59th Biennale in 2022. Anselm Kiefer’s Questi scritti, quando verranno bruciati, daranno finalmente un po’ di luce was particularly impactful; standing in the magnificent Sala dello Scrutinio in the Palazzo Ducale, dwarfed by his monumental paintings, I was deeply moved and felt overcome by an impulse—which seemed more like a necessity than a desire—to begin making work that was, for me, newly ambitious in terms of scale, format, and content.

Later that year, I visited The Rubell Collection and sat with Kerry James Marshall’s twelve-paneled Untitled woodcut; a few months later, after seeing Richard Avedon’s MURALS at The Met, I began, through the synthesization of these three disparate influences and the mystifying alchemy of creation, to conceptualize this project.

From the onset, Islands Are Not Forever emerged as a series of ongoing—if not theoretically endless—drawings intended to abound with life and its detritus. Rather than depicting a fixed, explicit narrative, the various scenarios and vignettes suggest, via legible and often recognizable touchstones, the hint or the scent of a narrative, allowing the viewer to construct and undertake their own journey as the work progresses.

The dominant ethos, however, might be canonization, as love, desire, connection, friendship, beauty, longing, and humanity’s relationship with the natural world are each highlighted and celebrated in various ways…Bodies, objects, and creatures span across natural breaks in the paper, emphasizing the fragility and ultimate impermanence of us as individuals.

Borrowed from a line in W.S. Merwin’s poem “Summer,” the series’ title echoes the sense of loss that pervades these tableaus, but the drawings’ continuity, their cumulation—which at the present moment happens to be fifty completed panels—proclaims that while we will undoubtedly perish, other things, things larger than us, such as what we have made, or even time itself, will thankfully abide. Since I began in late summer 2023, I knew that the making of this work is a response to and a way to commemorate the experiences and encounters that comprise my existence, but now that I am much, much deeper into the endeavor, I understand that Islands Are Not Forever is, at its essence, simply an inquiry into the idea of meaning: what it is, how we find it, and what we do with it once we have found it.”

- John Brooks, April 2026