The Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts is pleased to present new work by alumnus David Gilbert on view in the Gulf and Western Gallery. David Gilbert is the 2009 fellowship recipient of the Tierney Family Foundation Grant supporting the development of emerging photographers.

David Gilbert begins his process by making crude sculptures out of fabric, cardboard, paper, wood, plaster, and paint. He then photographs the resulting objects. In the photographs, the materials stubbornly remain readable as what they are, while the statues begin to resemble figures or body parts.

The sculptures appear as human beings before a camera: full of personality and character but also awkward and self-conscious. The sculptures themselves are messy, but the process of photographing cleans them up. Blown up huge, the prints add a certain heroicism to these small, scrappy sculptures, magnifying not only a sense of pathos but also one of humor.

David Gilbert was born in New York, NY in 1982. He received his BFA in 2004 from Tisch School of the Arts at NYU and will graduate in 2011 with an MFA from UC Riverside. His exhibition history includes solo shows at workspace and Gallery 1927 in Los Angeles, and group shows at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Brooklyn; Exile, Berlin; PlaySpace, San Francisco; Goff + Rosenthal, Berlin; The Bronx Museum of Art; and Art Metropole, Montreal.