David
Sherman was born in the Sonoran Desert. Early on, the desert’s
ecstatic qualities of light and temporality informed his vision. Drawn to
experimental cinema through his studies in philosophy at Hampshire College
in Massachusetts, Sherman relocated to the West Coast where he enmeshed
himself in the rich film culture of the Bay Area. Inspired by discarded
16mm films populating the dumpsters at the time, Sherman began to incorporate
found images into his filmmaking. He received his MFA from the San Francisco
Art Institute in 1997, the same year his film, Tuning the Sleeping Machine,
was included in the Whitney Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of
American Art, New York. Sherman’s work focuses on the perceptual underpinnings
of moving image media; his appropriation and collage based experimental
films construct hidden histories through the radical play of form and material.
Through digital manipulation, cast-off films are reinvented into mazelike
tapestries of subconscious desire and distress. His work recently screened
at the 2010 Chicago Underground Film Festival and national and international
venues including Image Forum, Tokyo; LUX Center, London; Musée National
D’Art, Paris. Upcoming exhibitions include Radical Light: Alternative
Film and Video in the San Francisco Bay Area 1945–2000 at the Berkeley
Art Museum, Berkeley, California.
He is one half of the artist collaboration known as Total Mobile Home. Recognized as founding the world’s first microcinema in San Francisco in 1993. Total Mobile Home has continued a practice of producing expanded-cinema performance and installations art. In 2004 they were artists in residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California where they produced film based sculptural, sound and projected works. Sherman was Administrative Director of Canyon Cinema from 1989-2001 and was an Adjunct Professor of Media Arts at California College of the Arts from 1997-2004. He currently resides in Bisbee, AZ., where he is President of Central School Project, an artist co-op.