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, along with the films of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles.
Read MoreWhile 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 by 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, unfolding 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 Haus der Kunst, Munich (Stan Douglas: Mise en scène, 2014, solo); Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria (Art/Histories, 2014); Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nîmes (Stan Douglas: Photography 2008, 2013, solo); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (New Pictures 7: Stan Douglas: Then and Now, 2013, solo); Moscow Photobiennale 2013 (Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio, 2013); Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden (Theatrical Fields, 2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (Think First, Shoot Later: Photography from the MCA Collection and The Way of the Shovel: Art as Archaeology, both 2013); The Museum of Modern Art, New York (XL: 19 New Acquisitions in Photography, 2013); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, (Blues for Smoke, 2012, travelling to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (The Living Years: Art after 1989, 2012); ZKM/Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (Fast Forward 2: The Power of Motion, 2010); and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Haunted: Contemporary Photography/ Video/ Performance, 2010).
