Following a career spent designing and building hundreds of structures, architectural designer David Dobie has shifted his practice from creating as a means of construction to manifesting a tangible experience with the physical remains of his process. Using countless models, sketches, drawings, copies of drawings, and iterations of drawings – all ideas put down on paper with the intention of guiding other people in the construction of something – Shifting Design III reconstitutes these layers and layers of paper design work into a series of suspended structures within the gallery. These become a solid enough volume to walk through and interact with while remaining transparent enough to convey our brief and fleeting time on earth.

Approaching the exhibition gallery, a trio of backlit façades greet the viewer in the stairwells and mezzanine, intersecting with the Edwardian architecture of the 1911 Heritage Courthouse that houses the Grand Forks Art Gallery. In the centre, a Cathedral Façade communicates with the divine through detail, glitz, and endless human effort while listening for a response that may never come. Flanking this is a Corporate Façade – an emblem of corporate power and wealth, complete with embellished towers built from
countless endeavours woven together to fit company mission statements and vision. Opposite, a Barn Façade celebrates the endurance of utilitarian buildings repurposed and reclaimed with hints of previous incarnations now seeking a new life. Taken together, these portray the often-conflicting motivations behind the built environment, balancing notions of permanence, utility, hubris, and expedience.

Entering the Reid Gallery, a gateway provides a portal to the exhibition experience, delineating both a beginning and an end. Within, three large arcs intersect the space. Curved ribs over radiating struts create semi-solid forms of translucence and tenuous structure. These can be seen as buildings emerging from or settling back down into the ground, equally full of ideals and potential while at the same time dissolving, being used for parts, and filling holes in the landscape. The space between the arcs compromises a long view to nature, much as glimpses of greenery and sky beyond the buildings provide respite in dense urban landscapes. The thin and fragile forms remind us of the tenuousness and limited lifespans of our physical efforts while the leftover spaces become what remains available for our external occupation and wandering. These gossamer panels document the endless efforts to build in this world with images of ideas and construction diagrams. Some capture random and fleeting thoughts; others illuminate the demonstrative and demanding directives of construction. Floating adjacent to the arcs, a manufactured forest of nine trees is suspended in space. These move individually with contact, swirling softly as they hover, rootless. An embodiment of our penchant to replicate nature to our bidding, free of discomfort, the structure and random branches represent tiny remnants of the original forest, while the paper panels detail diagrams of where all that wood fibre went. As the trees float slightly above the ground they gently swirl and sway, speaking of their history of fire, extraction, and multi-tasked lives draped with remnants of ideas and dreams. This exhibition considers the tension inherent in the use of wood, mostly construction softwood coming from the forests around us, as a medium of artistic expression, a resource for construction and economic growth, and as a finite life form, worthy of reverence and protection. From durable tight fine-grained fir and larch to soft skin-like pine and spruce, all stacked to be sliced and hammered together, the variations and volume of material required in order to construct the buildings captured in the layered drawings is almost inconceivable.

Shifting Design III is the culmination of two previous iterations of this project, assembled at the Capitol Theatre and outside City Hall in Nelson. Over time it has evolved – turning from the physical, tangible nature of building design and construction into a nuanced and conceptual reckoning with the fragility of life and the privilege of being in this world. Through the endlessly adjustable format of laminated drawings on paper over a wood framework we are asked to confront just how fast we as a species deplete the resources that we feel are limitless. Simultaneously an examination of the nature of craft, a meditation on the vulnerability of resource use, and a celebration of the human touch in the built environment, these structures show how ideas flip, come and go, transform into more nuanced versions of previous notions, and play on the metaphors of what we attach ourselves so tenaciously. It is a reminder that we are all here for only a short time, what we create endures in ways we rarely consider, and the process often compromises the values that we hold dear.