David Gilbert's first monograph covers more than a decade of the artist practice and gathers 114 photographs and an essay by writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer.
Lillies, David Gilbert's first monograph, reimagines the artist's studio as a paradigmatic space for multiple personhoods and alternative energies. Gathering 114 staged photographs, each composition depicts scenes of interiority, scaled-up dioramas of the artist's psychic landscape embodying what it might mean to be an artist. And indeed, leafing through Lillies, one has the vague sense of peeping into something private: while there are no actual bodies, everything speaks to the artist's presence, with his photographs appearing as vacant portraits shot before or after the subject sits. As a consequence, the work ultimately grants the same attention to disposable materials as to actual human presence. And Gilbert's constant focus on economical, ephemeral materials pushes us to reconsider what should be taken seriously and what should be discarded. From stickers to napkins and butcher paper, from painted cardboard to ripped rags and towels, from tulle to chiffon, ribbons, branches, sticks, and cans, the artist transforms banality into a constant wonder bearing unexpected and glorious details. And if all portraits are ghosts, in Gilbert's case, with actual people absent from the frame, the studio set-up becomes itself the subject, finally merging photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture. All in all, Lillies pushes us, as viewers, to look for beauty—another kind of beauty; a deeper kind of beauty—where no sign of it had been detected, where we have been told not to expect it.
The book is completed by an essay by writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, which contextualizes and expands Gilbert's practice, making Lillies a celebration of the temporary, the provisional, the impermanent, and the transitory.
Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer is an art writer and curator based in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Otis College of Art and Design, publishes
Pep Talk, and runs the experimental art venue The Finley Gallery. Her writing has appeared in such publications as
Artforum,
ArtReview,
Art in America,
Artonpaper,
ArtSlant,
Mousse, and exhibition catalogs.
David Gilbert (born 1982 in New York) lives and works in Los Angeles. David Gilbert's photography can be situated in the unique crossroads of sculpture, drawing, painting, assemblage, installation, and image reproduction. Using these various media, Gilbert stages and photographs mise-en-scènes in the studio which variously and indeterminately read as traces of action, aftermath, something in progress, or finally, some kind of incident, accidentally perceived. Characterized by a sense of open-ended mystery and adumbration, the work willfully embraces ambiguity as a generative, queer position. Its quasi-Victorian quality of metaphor and suggestion feels incredibly fresh and fertile in the literal and taxonomical explicitness of our moment. Gilbert's images are known to gracefully teem with draped curtains, window-sourced lighting, and a soft, accidental voyeurism. Shadows function as compositional and narrative devices, which help create the contemplative and melancholic mood of the photos while also inevitably reflecting on the indexical and intrinsically haunted nature of photography. In the case of Gilbert, a photography haunted by the absence of bodies, muted longing, and loss.
