Local architect showcases decades of work with Shifting Design exhibit
By The Nelson Daily Staff
Architect designer David Dobie has spent the past 40-plus years drafting, drawings and designing buildings, retreat centres, restaurants . . . well, pretty much everything during his four-decade career.
This week at the Capitol Theatre in Nelson, Dobie showcases his years of work with his Shifting Design exhibit before hosting a Gala Evening Saturday, January 7th.
The exhibit is open from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Capitol Theatre with the Gala set for 7 p.m.
“Two or three years ago, I had an incredible volume of files, and I said I can’t just recycle this,” Dobie explained during the opening of his exhibit at the Capitol Theatre.
“I’m doing this because I want to celebrate the hard work that went into the career that I had.”
Dobie said this exhibition of translucent panels that line the foyer and theatre seats of the Capitol Theatre is an act of letting go and a way to showcase his ideas that were brought to an acute focus and coherence on the drafting board and in the built projects dissolve back into the place they came from.
Separated from the projects that they were created for and shifted, rotated, or reversed, layered with other unrelated drawings, only their lines are recognizable, but as pure shapes, no longer visible as design ideas.
“I wasn’t out there in the public domain other than the finished product that people saw,” said Dobie, who created his designs using a pencil in hand from start to the finish of his career.
“I really enjoyed the process of designing and I wanted to share that with the people.”
Dobie said people are accustomed to thinking about architecture as buildings, as shelter or as art.
This exhibit invites the public to go behind the façade and encounter the visions, the false starts, the trial and error, the calculations, the intentions, the intricately rendered details that, given skill and care, might have ended up in someone’s house, but also might not.
It is a celebration of process rather than product. It seeks to embody in physical form that which is ephemeral and insubstantial, but without which great buildings are not possible.
Saturday’s Gala will include a time to wander through the exhibition, an artist’s talk as well as a performance by Juno Award nominated vocalist, Melody Diachun; bassist, Doug Stephenson; and Juno Award winning guitarist, Mike Rud.
For more information, go to the Capitol Theatre website.
