Like Thomas Demand, David Gilbert builds installations and photographs them. But that’s misleading. Where Demand’s carefully constructed sets recreate, in part, a range of historic and tabloid sites, Gilbert’s environments are disheveled, ephemeral, theatrical, and quite personal. Although several bodies of work are collected in Gilbert’s new book, Lilies(Zolo Press), they have a common location—a place caught somewhere between coming together and falling apart, forever unfinished. A stage draped but not yet decorated, a child’s room left to the kid’s wildest imagination, an abandoned playhouse. Even the most elaborately built sets look like they’re in a state of collapse, but if the party’s over, the evidence left behind can be oddly cheering and quite touching. read more