David S. Allee came to being an artist and photographer after a career in the field of urban planning. “My interests haven’t changed much since becoming an artist” he says, “structures, the built environment, that’s what I’m still drawn to, but in a less tangible and more abstract way.” His photographs have been exhibited and published widely and are in the permanent collection of major institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Library of Congress, and the Foundation Cartier in Paris, among others. He has had several solo exhibitions, including Princeton University in 2005 and the Knoxville Museum of Art in 2004. His work has been included in group shows at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Tampa Museum of Art, and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum. He received his MFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts, where he received the Ruttenberg Prize and studied with Joel Sternfeld, Robert Polidori, and Vera Lutter. He also holds a BA in Economics and Government from Cornell University, magna cum laude. Allee lives and works in New York City.
Artist Statement:
Allee’s photographs explore ways we perceive, imagine, and are influenced by the built environment. Working in series, and across five solo shows with the gallery, Allee's work has looked to reimagine the built world and landscape. He's drawn to elements of cities and suburbs that can feel unusual, incoherent, otherworldly, and which question our perception of the world in which we live. These include the often bizarre juxtaposition and overlapping of different land uses in Cross Lands; photographing into the brightest, blinding reflections of the sun on the cityscape in Dark Day; transforming three-dimensional views, such as a city skyline or an overgrown garden, into the illusion of a two-dimensional picture plane in Frame of View; and nocturnal images of familiar landscapes from the artists childhood--places that are visual manifestations of youthful experience and emotion, and amassed visual memory--in the series Chasing Firefly. Allee uses light in his work--found and available, natural and artificial, and often very intense--to emphasize these qualities of the cityscape and landscape and acknowledge our fragile relationship to the built world, constantly shifting between control and randomness, strangeness and beauty, and comfort and fear.