David Gilbert’s second solo presentation at Rebecca Camacho Presents features photographs of his paper and paint vignettes that are meant to evoke the quality of storybooks, and a sense of falling in and out of time.
The Los Angeles artist’s show of new work, “Fairy Tale,” has a charming hand-touched quality. Images like painted or cutout birds, windows, castles and trees are recognizable, but dappled with the light and shadow captured in the photos they take on a mysterious, almost magical feeling. The scale, perspective and constructed quality of some of the images makes one at times feel like a voyeur, perhaps in a dollhouse, perhaps on a stage.
It’s a show that’s perfectly named in that it evokes the books that hold fairy tales as much as it does the settings and details of those stories. The naturalness of the light and shadow activating these artificial materials feels almost enchanted.
Tony Bravo
