October 11–November 15, 2025
David Gilbert’s show at Chris Sharp’s new Melrose Hill gallery is a poetic, intimate exploration of power. The nine photographs on display (all works 2025) reference an architectural form—the castle—that arose in ninth-century Europe to defend expanding empires. The title, however, is borrowed from Dodie Smith’s 1948 iconic coming-of-age novel about the explorations in love and identity of a girl living in a ruined castle in Suffolk with her dysfunctional family. It’s not that Gilbert doesn’t wish to interrogate the politics and power dynamics implied by the architectural archetype, but his uncloaked allusion to a vintage YA novel suggests a more personal, nostalgic, even camp approach to the subject matter.
These works begin in Gilbert’s home and studio in East LA. In the vein of Kurt Schwitters in his Hanover Merzbau, the artist lives among the materials out of which he constructs his dioramas—he cuts, he weaves, he sculpts, he arranges, he patiently waits for the light … and then he photographs. The resulting images are layered, visually complex quodlibets that utterly resist dimensional legibility (without, it should be noted, any digital manipulation whatsoever). They are lush, theatrical scenes in which veils of paper, curling scrolls, seamless backdrops, ribbons, plastic props, paper sculpture and other collected, treasured desiderata commingle. That they are rendered in the sleek two dimensions of a printed photograph only enhances the illusion, as does their installation in a room whose highly polished floor and glass facade allow light and shadow to dance through the space as if in deliberate conversation with the work.
The desire to confuse a viewer’s understanding of what is “real” is as old as time (or at least as old as painting). In their famous fourth-century face-off, Zeuxis painted grapes so lifelike that birds attempted to pluck them from the panel, while Parrhasius painted a curtain so convincing that Zeuxis moved to pull it aside. The illusionistic curtain became its own genre, reaching its apogee in the trompe-l’oeil paintings of the Dutch and Flemish masters (in subtle acknowledgment of this context, Gilbert’s Tendril contains a wisp of curtain in the upper righthand corner, a motif he has iterated repeatedly in previous bodies of work). To play with these maneuvers—to activate the innately human delight in being unable to decipher what one is looking at—and to do it without cliché, is a singular achievement. Gilbert’s work does this, and much more.
In Thicket, painted ivy crawls up the edge of a white seamless backdrop while a veristic plastic length of morning glory vine dangles in the foreground to the right—both frame a sheet of paper bearing a graphite drawing of the artist’s own bare torso, itself covered in a proverbial thicket of chest hair, its soft folds echoing those of the undulating angel wings (traced from the blown-up “wing” emoji) in Princess, Leaves and Flickers. Elsewhere the ivy returns: in both Tendril and Leaves, Gilbert coaxes a photographically printed paper garland to creep and crawl, alluding to the fairytale vines that ensnare narcoleptic princesses. The colors in this body of work refer to a mesmerizing scene in Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) in which a pair of dueling fairies wave their wands to turn the princess’s dress back and forth between blue and pink, leaving it for a moment splattered in a Pollockian mix of both.
A pair of works, Stronghold (blue) and Stronghold (pink), bring this coded color dichotomy to the fore. There is no battle of blue and pink without an implied battle of the sexes, without a reference to the tensions between what—in American culture in particular—is considered masculine and what feminine. A queer artist with a professed love of pink since childhood, Gilbert’s work nuances the binary, unsettles the expectations. Stronghold (blue) and Stronghold (pink) each center a hanging, diaphanous object that, on very close inspection, is revealed to be the mortar that binds the masonry of a castle. Gilbert drew the castle onto tracing paper before meticulously hand-cutting the sheet to omit the stones. What remains is a depiction of the soft, wet, malleable substance without which a fortress would topple. This lacy matrix buckles under its own weightlessness, droops like the caul fat of a butchered animal shorn from the supportive muscle beneath it. The pink version of this composition especially evokes viscera, but it lacks violence; Gilbert’s dissections are tender, delicate, loving, even if their message is subversive.
At a time when the United States feels on the verge of a civil war, when “No Kings” protests ripple across the country, the castle is an especially freighted theme. President Trump is tearing down the East Wing of the White House to erect a lavish ballroom in order to realize his fantasy of living in a castle. Meanwhile, Disneyland—one of the United States’ chief instruments of soft power, a place designed to make castles and fairytales tangible—has seen visitor numbers plunge as international travel contracts under his rule. Filled with slack, deflated symbols of sovereignty, Gilbert’s works portray power as literally “soft”: defanged, flimsy, a little bit silly (Princess features a tower in a tutu). I can’t help but see it as a subtle send-up of Trump.
“I Capture the Castle” is in many respects a loving ode to the joy of childhood, but it is dirge-like too, in its reflections on what it means to be middle-aged, gay, childless, a cultural descendent of a generation lost to AIDS, and still to meet a world in turmoil over sexual identity. But for all of their subtext, for all of the complexity of their politics, these photographs are breathtakingly beautiful. The first image you encounter when you enter the gallery is the enormous, seventy by forty-five–inch print called Keep, an arresting image in which an origami-like folded paper castle, replete with crenelated towers, is pinned precariously against a sensuous, textured field of magnolia petal pink. The “keep,” which refers to an innermost sanctuary or a place of confinement, is a salient metaphor for a time in which most political buzzwords seem to have taken on dual meanings, often for reasons as arbitrary as the tilt of the wind or the angle of the sun.
