Postmasters Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by David Herbert. The show titled “Nostalgia for Infinity” will open on May 21 and will be on view until June 27. The reception is scheduled for Thursday, May 21 between 6 and 8 pm.

David Herbert’s sculptures, video installations, paintings and drawings combine images of pop culture and American history with a fearless use of materials. In earlier works Herbert created his transformed versions of the Black Monolith from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Superman, Hindenburg Zeppelin, the Bates Hotel, Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, and Starship Enterprise rendered in fabric, plexiglas, aluminum, sculpey, paper pulp, cement, and conduit pipe.

In the current show, Herbert’s second with Postmasters, he continues this exploration into pop images and materials by focusing on the creations of illustrators and animators as a point of departure to navigate the slippery divide between fact and fiction, decay and resurrection, past and future, and comedy and tragedy. He pulls works of fantasy down to earth and levitates the mundane. In Herbert’s work apocalypse meets hope and exuberance.

A centerpiece of “Nostalgia for Infinity” is “Monarch” (2008) – a monumental, twice the human scale sculpture of a silver bodied creature from the movie “Alien” made from chicken wire and spray foam that sits, slumping, in a rocking chair. The chair, made from layered plywood, has been weathered and is visibly repaired with rusty steel strips and mounds of oozing glue. Resting on the alien’s hand is a butterfly. This regal, larger-than-life husk of an soulless killer alien, is part Grandma Moses and part tragic Shakespearean figure. It evokes existential turmoil and resignation but also hope and resilience.

Second gallery is occupied by “Séance for the Symphony” (2009) – a near exact replica of the classic first Mickey Mouse cartoon and vessel of Americana , “Steam Boat Willie” (1928). Herbert’s seven minute long video, combining puppetry, stop-animation, and motion graphics, is made exclusively from cardboard, paper, wire and string. The re-created cartoon plays within a translucent sculpture of a floating movie palace. A ghost-like set for what was once a giant step in filmmaking and corporate identity, “Séance for the Symphony” becomes a personal attempt at resurrection – a do-it-yourself copy of an icon that no longer stands.

David Herbert graduated from a sculpture department at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He was included in “Freedom” The Hague Scupture Project 08 and his works were recently on view in “Carnival Within – An Exhibition Made in America,” curated by Sabine Russ and Gregory Volk at Uferhallen in Berlin.