Review
OPEN HOUSE
Susan Dobson
Runs until March 13
Art Gallery of Calgary
(117 Eighth Avenue S.W.)
Have you ever had an urge to snoop around your neighbours’ house? You know, take a really close look into every nook and cranny of the place? Try to figure out what exactly makes them tick and answer a few nagging questions you’ve been puzzling over?
Well now, thanks to Ontario-based photographer Susan Dobson, you won’t have to risk the embarrassment of being caught nosing around where you don’t belong.
In the exhibition Open House at the Art Gallery of Calgary, Dobson has done all the snooping for you. With 18 large colour photographs to gawk at, viewers can experience intimate places where it feels like the occupants must have been just moments before.
Dobson started out her explorations of urban spaces with photographs that left her on the outside looking in. In shows such as No Fixed Address and Home Invasion, she trained her camera on suburbia’s outward appearances. Her most common target was the "cookie cutter" homes that now fill the streets of Canada with a mind-numbing dullness that often provokes open hostility.
Dobson has said she photographs assembly-line homes under construction and urban home interiors "in order to question the implications of uniformity and assimilative living practices."
In Open House, instead of another cynical view of the stupidity of suburbia, viewers have an opportunity to discover a different dimension. Dobson shows us rooms where the inhabitants adorn their spaces in what can be interpreted either as a noble, or sad, effort to break free of places that trap their creative souls inside.
In one of the show’s best images, we see two broken-down easy chairs, one with an Elvis Presley cushion atop it, in a daylight-filled room that features a wall hanging of a matador in the moment just before he finishes off a bull that is bleeding from its wounds. Behind one of the chairs is an acoustic guitar and behind the other a reading lamp.
As a counterpoint to the violent bullfighting scene, there is an old wooden crate from the T. Eaton Co. that balances two plastic suitcases and, on top of the suitcases, bookends in the shape of horse heads, holding up a slight collection of books.
The scene is garish and laughable, yet the more one peers at this private room made public, the more it takes on heroic dimensions. Home decorators may faint at the sight of this photograph, but it’s someone’s space of solitude and that rings true in this captivating photograph.
Dobson’s work is not new or groundbreaking. William Eggleston, the southern gentleman of American photography, has been producing colour (dye transfer) photographs of the interiors of private homes for decades. But Dobson brings Eggleston’s techniques to Canada’s suburbs, giving us the chance to sneak inside one another’s homes and see how we live. |
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