Window Treatments
Window Treatments
By David Gilbert
David Gilbert’s practice embraces a variety of media including sculpture, painting, assemblage, and installation, yet ultimately it culminates in photography. He repurposes scraps and found objects-fabric, yarn, paper and cardboard-to create transitory scenes in his studio. The ephemeral nature of his material choices lead to the creation of poetic, haunting images. Devoid of people, Gilbert pays careful attention to lighting, so that light and shadow become the significant characters in his photographs. While intentional in their compositions, the works also rely on chance and improvisation as Gilbert captures the quickly changing sunlight beaming into his studio. This ever changing and often fading light infuses the work with a meditative and melancholic air.
While photography is often embraced for its supposed objective, documentary nature, Gilbert’s photographs celebrate the suggestive and the beautiful- deliberately leaving room for mystery and curiosity: he asks the viewer to allow for uncertainty and to participate in the process of interpretation.
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.
This artwork is presented in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival and InTransit BC.
