From the moment Robert moved to Halifax he tried to capture the feeling of a city in an artwork. This work combines collage, line drawing and text. The cross-hatched lines, such an important feature of Robert’s realist work, is used here in a more abstract way to suggest the city is a collection of intersecting junctions, a cacophony of grids. At the centre of this imaginary city is one monolithic form made from a cash receipt underlined by a heavy strip of black paper. Everything comes back to money, even art.

Conceptual artists believed that artworks that were primarily ideas avoided the manipulations of the art market. What they didn’t realize is that ideas can be sold as readily as objects. By making a cash receipt a kind of monument at the center of the city, Robert implies that monetary exchanges are valued above all others. This is the critique of making visible, forcing an examination of values otherwise taken for granted.