STAN DOUGLAS
is an artist.
| Date of Birth | Oct 11, 1960 |
|---|---|
| Place of Birth | Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| Gender | male |
| Living & Working Place(s) |
Vancouver, BC, Canada |
| Representing Gallery(ies) |
Zeno X Gallery (Antwerp, Belgium) |
Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver. An African Canadian, he grew up in a white middle-class neighborhood in Vancouver. He attended the Emily Carr College of Art + Design from 1979 to 1982. From 1982 to 1983, he made installations with projected slides, which he presented in movie theaters. Around this time, he destroyed his earlier work as an impetus to start anew.
In 1983 Douglas began reading the complete oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, an undertaking that some time later launched an exhibition and catalogue developed by Douglas on the playwright’s work for television and film. This exhibition toured from1988 to 1992. In the mid- to late 1980s, Douglas made still photographs, worked in film (incorporating found footage into his own loops), and started to use video. His large photograph Panoramic Rotunda was shown in a 1985 solo show at the artist-operated Or Gallery in Vancouver, where Douglas would serve on the board in the late 1980s. In video works of the 1980s, Douglas addressed such complex subjects as the lasting repercussions of historical events, issues of racial and class difference, how film and media operate as modes of communication, and the impact of linguistics.
In 1989 his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers. In 1992 Douglas’s Monodramas were broadcast on Toronto and Vancouver television to a similar effect. That same year, the artist edited and designed the book Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art (1992), and worked in Paris as the guest of the Centre Georges Pompidou. While there he created Hors-champs, which looks at the free jazz developed by African American expatriates in Paris in the 1960s.
While researching his 1993 film Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin, B.C., Douglas created a related series of photographs, a process typical of his working style. In 1997–98, he spent a great deal of time in Detroit, working on a series of photographs, Detroit Photos, that document this American city, which he had been shocked to find so devastated. A related film installation, Le Detroit, was completed in 1999. Through the Detroit projects, he pursued an interest in “failed utopias” and the interrelationships between people and America’s urban spaces. In Win, Place or Show (1998), Douglas first introduced computer-generated, random ordering into his videos, creating seemingly endless, subtle variations within single works. He again employed this technique for Suspiria, a project he created for the 2002 Documenta 11. This work consisted of both anonymous television spots broadcasted on a local German station and as a film on site at the Kassel exhibition projecting a series of reiterations that mixed live feed with prerecorded material.
In 2004 Douglas again turned his attention to neglected urban spaces, this time in Cuba. Following a photographic series of the island’s abandoned buildings (2004–05), Douglas created the film installation Inconsolable Memories in 2005, which intricately incorporates elements from Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) (1968). Douglas’s video installation Klatassin (2006) follows six threads of conflict surrounding a murder committed on Day X in 1864 in the midst of Canada’s gold rush. In both of these recent films, a clear past and present are blurred and a linear narrative ruptured.
Solo shows of Douglas’s art have been organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (1987 and 1994), Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1994), Milwaukee Art Museum (1994), the Vancouver Art Gallery (1999 and 2009), the Art Institute of Chicago (2000), Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha (2005), and Württembergischer Kunstverein in Stuttgart (2007), among other venues. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Biennale of Sydney (1990,1996, and 2000), Venice Biennale (1990, 2001, and 2005), Documenta 9, 10, and 11 (1992, 1997, and 2002), Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (1995 and 1997), Whitney Biennial (1995), Carnegie International (1995), Berlin Biennale (1998), Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003), Samuel Beckett at Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2007), The Cinema Effect at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2008), and True North at Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin (2008). In 1989 Douglas was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He was awarded a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst to work in Berlin in 1994. In 1996 Douglas was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum’s inaugural Hugo Boss Prize, and in 2001 he was awarded the Arnold Bode Prize. In 2008 Douglas received the Bell Award in Video from the Canada Council for the Arts. The artist lives and works in Vancouver.
Portrait (3)
