Additional Images

Provenance:

Courtesy the artist; Michael Gibson Gallery, London, Ontario.

Installation Photo: Susan Dobson: Slide | Lecture (installation view), 2021 © James Morley, The Image Centre.

The Work & Artist Bio

Van Gogh — Van Gogh, 2021, is a photograph where the title leads you astray. At first look what we’re seeing is as nicely ambiguous as the image itself. Are we looking at a two-dimensional work on the wall? Are we looking down into the contents of a drawer of — what? Then the cleverness and poignancy of the work unfolds. We are looking at a photograph where the artist is looking down, with her camera focused on the contents of a drawer. This is one very small section of what has been a notable collection of visual images in the slide library of the Faculty of Art at the University of Guelph — now digitized and "consigned to the dust bin.” But here — memory, history, outdated technology — and loss are rendered beautiful and elegiac by photographer Susan Dobson.

Susan Dobson is a photo-based artist residing in Guelph, Ontario. She has personal interests in the built environment and in the technical, material, and ontological qualities of the photographic medium. Her recent work examining obsolete and de-accessioned university slide libraries has been exhibited at The Image Centre and Michael Gibson Gallery, and was mounted as a public installation in Tenerife, Spain. The Image Centre exhibition was reviewed by Kate Taylor in The Globe and Mail and by Rhiannon Vogl in Border Crossings. Georgia Phillips-Amos wrote about the work in the publication Les archives/The Archive, edited by Martha Langford and Eduardo Ralickas. Annebella Pollen discussed the work in the book Photography Off the Scale: Technologies and Theories of the Mass Image, edited by Tomáš Dvořák and Jussi Parikka. A central installation in The Image Centre exhibition was listed in The Globe and Mail as one of “The 10 Most Stunning and Startling Artworks at Canadian Galleries in 2021.”

Dobson’s works are in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Canada, Oakville Galleries, the Swiss Museum of Photography, The Image Centre, the Portland Art Museum, and others. Dobson is Professor of Studio Art at the University of Guelph, and is represented by Michael Gibson Gallery. In December 2023, her exhibition “Parallax” was mounted at the Tom Thomas Art Gallery, and her work is included in Scotiabank’s forthcoming book, Selections from the Scotiabank Art Collection: Canada.

Susan Dobson, Border Crossings Issue 159, 2022

Anxious Desires: The Photography of Susan Dobson, Border Crossings Issue 119, 2011

Artist's Website

Michael Gibson Gallery