Stan Douglas

Through photography, film and installation, the Canadian artist Stan Douglas has, since the late-1980s, examined complex intersections of narrative, fact and fiction while scrutinising the constructs of the media he employs and their influence on our understanding of reality. Douglas's work is often in the first instance an examination of place - Potsdam, Cuba and Detroit have provided the impetus for, respectively, Der Sandmann (1995), Inconsolable Memories (2005) and Le Détroit (1999) - but entangled with the detail of specific geographical and political circumstance is a diverse range of source material that has included the writings of Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Theodor W. Adorno and ETA Hoffmann, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. While we may recognise the literary, filmic or musical references, along with the stories, places or even characters appropriated in these complex works, expectations are often frustrated. Instead of narrative fulfilment, Douglas offers us complexity, perplexity and doubt. The artist has remarked that 'life is all middle' and in Douglas's work the viewer often finds himself plunged into events whose beginnings are obscured and whose ends seem to dissolve into mutability. For instance, the films Journey Into Fear (2001), which makes reference to Eric Ambler's 1940s spy novel as well as Herman Melville's 1857 novel 'The Confidence Man', and Klatsassin (2006), which referring to Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon reveals details of a murder in nineteenth-century British Columbia through a series of sometimes contradictory flashbacks and anecdotes, unfold over many days. Both are examples of Douglas's 'recombinant' works - sequences of imagery and dialogue generated by computer as permutations that are capable of running without repetition for timespans way in excess of the conventional art-viewing experience. As such, the works unmoor themselves from formal requirements of narrative and expectations of authorship as they liberate the viewer to reflect on the contingencies of truth in the wider world. It is no coincidence that Douglas often chooses to locate his work where failures of political and social systems are most apparent. His critical eye focused on events that could have taken a very different turn, Douglas attunes us to the possibility of alternative outcomes.

Born in Vancouver in 1960, Stan Douglas has been the subject of numerous solo and group exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Recent venues have included the ZKM/Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany (Fast Forward 2: The Power of Motion, 2010); the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Haunted: Contemporary Photography/Video/Performance, 2010); the International Center of Photography, New York (3rd ICP Triennial of Photography and Video: Dress Codes, 2009 and Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art, 2008); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (The Cinema Effect: Illusion, Reality, and the Moving Image, Part I: Dreams, 2008); the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007, solo); the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (Samuel Beckett, 2007); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005, solo); and kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2004, solo).

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