Susan Dobson: Rememory
September 17 to November 2, 2008
For the exhibition Rememory, Guelph artist Susan Dobson posits the structure of the past within the present by photographing people in the midst of remembering. She achieves this by asking her sitters to close their eyes and recall a moment of personal significance. They are photographed in complete darkness, freed from the camera’s appraising gaze and encouraged to regress into memory. By using 4 × 5 inch Polaroid negatives and a large-format view camera, Dobson creates portraits with exquisite tonal quality and discrete focus. The negatives are then digitally scanned and output as giclée prints on photo rag paper. As repositories of memory, Dobson’s photographs reconcile time passed and present, seen and remembered, surfaced and surfacing.
The twenty-four photographs that were in the exhibition are large, some four-and-a-half feet in height, and represent a precise selection from a body of work that presently includes more than sixty portraits. The necessarily oversized prints, which enable close examination of each face, is the only overt element in a body of work that is otherwise acutely restrained. The size of the works, and Dobson’s use of both traditional and digital photographic technologies, firmly locates her contemporary practice in dialogue with the past. Her portraits are repositories of memory, reconciliations between past and present, faulty and limited rememories.
For Rememory, Dobson introduced video into her practice. She transformed one of her portraits from photographic still to video presented on a flat screen monitor. It begins as a latent image that slowly takes form, gaining depth and contrast as the image strengthens, disappears, and resurrects in an infinite loop. It isn’t actually video but a discrete layering of still on still that is only perceived to shift and change. Dobson’s engagement of a single “moving image” references the collaborative environment in which the entire body of work has been made: the person sitting for Dobson’s camera actively engages in remembering, allowing the artist to capture this most intimate act on film.
Dobson’s extraordinary body of work, Rememory, was revealed for the first time publicly in the Macdonald Stewart Art Centre’s exhibition curated by Dawn Owen. The Art Centre announced the acquisition of work from Rememory,
purchased for the permanent collection with funds raised by the Art Centre Volunteers and with the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts Acquisition Assistance Program, 2008. The exhibition and catalogue were presented with support from the Ontario Arts Council and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Opening Reception: Wednesday, September 17 at 7 PM with the artist in attendance.
Artist’s Talk with Susan Dobson: Tuesday, October 21 at noon.
Images:
Left: Untitled, 2008 (giclée on rag paper)
Centre: Untitled, 2008 (giclée on rag paper)
Right: Untitled, 2008 (giclée on rag paper)