December 1 – 31, 2005
Susan Dobson’s “Open House” series explores the relationship between self-identity, biography and home décor in her large-scale color photographs of residential interiors. For the home owner, veracity has taken a backseat to the process of assimilation, gathering, and transforming individual elements into carefully constructed biographies. The careful crafting of each photograph hints at a secondary narrative, as the sharp, saturated images suggest that the photographs, like the interiors, might be purposeful constructions. Sixteen Oakville residents collaborated with Dobson, an artist known for her documentation of a town’s growth into generic urban sprawl. Seeing the details of the residents’ living spaces through their eyes, Dobson worked to photographically “frame” the scope of their lives in the form of an image of a key room in each of their homes.
Susan Dobson was born in Moncton, New Brunswick, and lived in Germany for much of her childhood before returning to Canada. She is best known for her photographs of landscape and urban and suburban architecture. Her photographs have been exhibited in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Belgium, China, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. Her work has also been exhibited in major photography festivals including CONTACT (Toronto), Fotoseptiembre (Mexico City), Le Mois de la Photo (Montreal), Bitume/Bitumen (Brussels), and Fotonoviembre (Canary Islands), and her work was included in the Canadian Biennial titled Builders at the National Gallery of Canada in 2012. She was a contributing artist to the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad. Dobson’s photographs have been featured in publications including CV Photo, Photo Metro, The Globe and Mail, Prefix Photo, and Border Crossings, and have been published in Carte Blanche, a compendium of Canadian photography, and Massive Change by Bruce Mau. Dobson is the recipient of two Gold National Magazine awards, and numerous awards and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, including the K.M. Hunter award for visual arts. She was recently awarded a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada toward a collaborative project with curator Alison Nordström titled The Pictured Past and the Future Perfect: Shifting Tenses in Contemporary Photography. Dobson is Associate Professor and MFA Program Coordinator at the University of Guelph.
