Retail

The series Retail depicts large franchise retail outlets, commonly known as box stores, set against vibrant, corporate blue skies and vast deserted parking lots. The structures themselves are digitally filled in with grey, emphasizing each building’s outline and establishing a visual relationship with the grey asphalt in the foreground. Some stores, such as Harvey’s, are nothing more than what Robert Venturi refers to as decorated sheds – utilitarian boxes that have no distinct structural form and are distinguishable from one another only by their signage. Others, such as The Beer Store, employ a distinct shape as a form of branding – like subdivision housing, they appear to have been stamped from identical moulds.

The vibrant blue sky colour may hint at consumer optimism, yet the grey buildings and the expanse of empty asphalt foreshadow the impermanence of retail structures and mass consumption in a time of economic uncertainty and environmental awareness. “Seen within this context,” writes Robin Metcalfe, “Dobson’s ghostly big-box stores glisten like a digital mirage, prescient images of a doomed landscape.”

Full text by curator Robin Metcalfe: Temporary Architectures

Billboard installation for the Vancouver 2010 Olympiad