Susan Dobson's photographic art concerns itself with the everyday built environment. It considers the tension between uniformity and individualism: how different lives are lived in spaces built to the same pattern. Susan Dobson, Temporary Architectures, presents two bodies of work by this Toronto-based photo artist. Retail presents large mural images of big-box stores, marooned in parking-lot wastelands, with the façade of each store greyed out.The resulting void reflects the spiritual emptiness of our built environment, furnished with a transient architecture that is both dull and monolithic. Reduced to a grey silhouette, some of the buildings remain recognisable by their trademark outline shapes. In her 2002 series, Paint Palettes, Susan Dobson produced five panels in which she groups paint colours available from various commercial distributors. In each panel, the artist digitally inserted the colours into the same photograph of a pair of garage doors, repeated in a grid above and below a title text – The Heritage Collection, The Romance Collection, The Gothic Collection – like a page of swatches in a paint catalogue. Calling each a "collection" links them to couture, suggesting that the paints are garments, easily substituted when mood or weather changes. This full-colour exhibition brochure features an essay by exhibition curator, Robin Metcalfe.

Robin Metcalfe has a prenatal affinity for Nova Scotia crafts — his mother met his father while she was teaching weaving in Glace Bay. Like most of the people profiled in Studio Rally, he is a self-employed cultural producer — a freelance writer and independent curator.

Robin Metcalfe's profile page