SUSAN DOBSON: TRANSMISSION

Curated by Iga Janik

January 14 – February 26, 2012

OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, January 14 at 2:30 pm

An exhibition of new video work by photographer Susan Dobson premiers at Cambridge Galleries. Simulcast, a 25 minute video piece consists of a single-frame image captured through the windshield of a moving vehicle on paved and unpaved roads late at night. Illuminated only by the headlights of the car and occasional passing vehicles, it is a monotonous video trip through ordinary landscape. A carefully edited version of the original 1938 "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast plays in the background with the addition of a digital GPS system providing periodic directions to an anonymous driver.

Dobson contrasts the use of digital and analogue technologies to create a relationship between new and old. The veracity of information in any medium is highlighted and questioned, while the dramatic combination of video and sound used in Simulcast creates a strong sense of anxiety and suspense.

This exhibition is accompanied by a publication, Susan Dobson: Shifting Tenses co-published by Cambridge Galleries and The Robert McLaughlin Gallery.


ARTIST BIO:

Susan Dobson was born in New Brunswick, grew up in Germany, and now lives with her partner and two children in Guelph, Ontario. Her photographs and installations have been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions across Canada, as well as in the United States, United Kingdom, Belgium, China, Germany, Spain, and Mexico. She has been a featured artist in photography festivals such as CONTACT (Toronto, Canada), Fotoseptiembre (Mexico City), Le Mois de la Photo (Montreal, Canada), Bitume/Bitumen (Brussels), and FotoNoviembre (Spain). She was a contributing artist to the Vancouver 2010 Cultural Olympiad and her work was presented on billboards in Vancouver as part of the exhibition Endlessly Traversed Landscapes. Her work is in the collections of museums and corporate collections, such as the Centennial Gallery, the Art Gallery of Windsor, the Portland Museum, and the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography, an affiliate of the National Gallery of Canada.

Dobson's photographs have been published in periodicals and newspapers such as CV Photo, Photo Metro, The Globe and Mail, and Border Crossings and have been featured in Carte Blanche, a compendium of Canadian photography, and Massive Change by Bruce Mau. She has lectured on photography at institutions such as the University of Waterloo, the University of Barcelona, and the National Arts Centre in Mexico City. 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. Most recently, she received a major grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for her project The Pictured Past and the Future Perfect: Shifting Tenses in Contemporary Photography. Dobson is Associate Professor in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph. More information about her work is available at www.susandobson.com.

Admission is free, everyone is welcome.

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Images: Susan Dobson. Transmission, 2010. Lightjet transparency on light box. Image courtesy of the artist.