Scrubbers, 2018
Project Native Informant, London
For Brooks’ first solo exhibition with Project Native Informant, they created a series of paintings which brought together notions of cleanliness, normativity and morality in a dramatized satirical fiction, exploring the ways the body was manipulated through the lens of hygiene.
Brooks described a fictional commercial cleaning company, 'Scrubbers', as they worked their way through a number of familiar institutional spaces; the public toilet, the gym, the psychotherapy room, punctuated by coffee and cigarette breaks. Instead of working undisturbed into the night, their schedule took them into opening hours, and both the cleaners and service users clashed in space, confronted, undermined and disrupted by each other's tasks. Equipment was broken, or had mutated over time, visible plumbing was ineffective or obsolete, the technologies of hygiene that steered these spaces and their occupants into production were destabilized, rendering the spaces obsolete, sullied, soiled.
People, objects, architecture and motifs were deliberately arranged in the works to convey a frantic tension, highlighting our persistent efforts as consumers to maintain, modify and 'enhance' ourselves, often to the detriment of our own well-being. Brooks used this irony (that the hygienic practices and commodities promising us ever more easy, clean, authentic, and better ways to be, so often led to economic hardship and poor mental health) and turned it on its head, mocking the absurdity of these hygienic embodiments and destabilizing their efforts to show us what we really need.