Maizie Gilbert Profile

Maizie Gilbert is looking for something.  The details of a face slipping into the folds of her memory, the contours of a flexed bicep, the lines in a bent knee: images that were once clear but are slowly fading with time.  Beyond these details, she’s looking for a place in the art world.  As a 31-year-old emerging photographer in the already over-saturated scene, she’s hoping for a niche where she can sustain herself financially, emotionally, and spiritually. 

Gilbert grew up in Mendocino and moved to San Francisco for college. She’s always been surrounded by art; her father was a painter.  But it was not until she finished her Italian major at San Francisco State University that she started taking photography classes. 

“I took so long to come to photography and to get an MFA and to decide to be an artist because of my dad.  It seemed like it was impossible to do it and be successful and have it sustain you. He was going to be a big painter in New York.  But he ended up moving out here and meeting my mom and moving to the country.  He stopped painting when I was a kid.”

But it was not long after those initial classes that Gilbert realized what she had to do. After finishing her degree in 1994, she went straight into graduate school at the California College of Arts and Crafts.  “I had all kinds of ideas about what I wanted to do.  I thought psychology, holistic health for awhile, acupuncture or something.  But soon it was obvious that this was really all that I care about.  In terms of a career, I didn’t really have a choice.”

Her work has followed a similar pattern of search and discovery.  She’s played with different styles, different cameras and different printing techniques, and she’s received a variety of responses.  But it’s her most recent work that’s gaining the most attention.  It’s been described by reviewers as everything from “walking the edge of dreamlike, spiritlike, disembodied yet distinguishable form” in Art Papers, to “something like Pee-wee Herman’s anthropomorphic furniture as interpreted by a megaminimalist” in the Guardian.  It’s been shown in many local galleries such as Southern Exposure and SF Camerawork, and it will soon be featured in the California Invitational, the inaugural show at the newly transported Friends of Photography. 

This new body of work has a subtlety and maturity lacking in her earlier pieces, and collectors and critics are noticing.  It’s an emotional project, and the photographs show a very personal side of the artist.  The series is made up of 16x20 photographs shot with a medium format camera.  The images are barely there, body parts (and more recently vegetables) that appear to fade into a white background.  They evoke a sense of longing, urgency, and desperation.  Her images float the way dreams linger for just a few moments between wake and sleep.  And it is in this liminal space that Gilbert finds her inspiration.

“There’s some kind of a texture that I can sort of see or feel when I’m right between being awake and being asleep.  I’ll get an image in my head and I’ll try to make that image.  It’s the kind of thing that whenever I try to grab it, it’s gone.”

And so her work fades in and out of focus – drowning into the paper like a dream.  Some parts are clearly visible: a toe, an eye, the curve of a back, and others only hint at the presence of someone: a fold, a bend, a shadow of someone or something no longer there.

“The work visually expresses the way that things get sort of soft when you try to call them back in the mind’s eye.  Memory is mutable.  You go back to a memory and it’s kind of diluted like in a dream.  You can’t recall things clearly… It’s about loss and about trying to hold on to things and look at things more closely.”

Gilbert has frequently dealt with loss.  Her mother passed away when she was seventeen.  Her partner died this past January.  She says these experiences have changed the way she perceives the world.  “That’s really affected the way that I think and the way that I see… life being so transitory and just being aware of that… I think a lot about moments and how poignant they are.  And when they’re gone you can never go back to them except through memory or a photograph or an object.”

And so her art tries to recapture a sense of what was lost, to preserve moments just before they disappear.

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