Art Fundraiser LA | Timed Auction

Kaucyila Brooke is an artist based in Los Angeles. She has been a regular faculty member of the Program in Photography and Media at CalArts since 1992.

Brooke’s multidisciplinary practice addresses the politics of cultural production and sexual representation. In diverse narrativized and serial formats—including large-scale photomontages, photo novellas, and photographic archives—she reevaluates the status of the photograph as object. 

Often based on archival research, many of Brooke’s projects focus on the recoding of the photographic genres of portraiture, still life, documentary reportage, and landscape. Pursuing a structural approach that is inherently allegorical, the work opens upon a range of interpretation brought about by the juxtaposition of disparate photographic fragments. In The Boy Mechanic (1996–ongoing), she documents a social history of lesbian bars by photographing their present and former locations in cities such as San Diego, Cologne, San Francisco, Oakland and Los Angeles.

The Boy Mechanic/ Cologne
Offset printed poster
33 x 47 in. (83.3 x 119.4 cm.)
Created in 2005

The Boy Mechanic/San Diego
Offset printed postcards and envelopes
4.5 x 6 in. (11.4 x 15.2 cm.)
Created in 2006

The Boy Mechanic/Los Angeles
Inkjet print on paper
16 x 24 in. (40.6 x 61 cm.)
Created in 2019