For the exhibition Rememory, Guelph artist Susan Dobson posits the structure of the past within the present by photographing people in the midst of remembering. She achieves this by asking her sitters to close their eyes and recall a moment of personal significance. They are photographed in complete darkness, freed from the camera's appraising gaze and encouraged to regress into memory. By using 4x5 inch Polaroid negatives and a large-format view camera, Dobson creates portraits with exquisite tonal quality and discrete focus. As repositories of memory, Dobson's photographs reconcile time passed and present, seen and remembered, surfaced and surfacing. The twenty-four photographs in the exhibition are large and represent a precise selection from a body of work that presently include more than sixty portraits. The necessarily over-sized prints, which enable close examination of each face, is the only overt element in a body of work that is otherwise acutely restrained. The size of the works, and Dobson's use of both traditional and digital photographic technologies, firmly locates her contemporary practice in dialogue with the past. Dobson's portraits are repositories of memory, reconciliations between past and present, faulty and limited rememories.

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