Through photography, film and installation the Canadian artist Stan Douglas has, since the late-1980s, examined complex intersections of narrative, fact and fiction while simultaneously scrutinising the media he employs and how it shapes our understanding of reality. Douglas' work is often in the first instance an examination of place–Lisbon, Potsdam, Havana and Detroit have provided the impetus for, respectively, The Secret Agent, 2015, 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 literary constructs of Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and ETA Hoffmann, and 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' 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.
A retelling of Joseph Conrad's 1907 spy novella - a story of espionage, double-crossing and murky political entanglement - the six-screen work The Secret Agent restages the narrative in 1970s Portugal and the aftermath of the country's Carnation Revolution. Characteristic of Douglas' sensitivity to the nuanced dynamics of public and private memory in its subtle blending of historical fact, meticulous reconstruction, and fictive source material, this immersive six-screen work withholds conclusions from the viewer, even as multiple viewpoints tantalisingly suggest the possibility of privileged access to the truths of a complex situation.
Midcentury Studio, 2010, a series of large-scale stark monochrome photographs, each depicting a single scene from a much larger narrative, takes up the conceit of a fictional photojournalist as central protagonist. The series follows an orderly sequential chronology, yet Douglas defies straightforward storytelling conventions in favour of more elaborate constructed narratives in a questioning of authorship and reality. This affords Douglas the chance to create a series which, whilst being rooted in the contemporary evokes the aura and preoccupation with melodrama of the mid-century through the guise of jugglers, actresses, magicians, carnival curiosities, paparazzi and crime scene reportage. Through these individual casts of characters, Douglas carefully choreographs the underlying tension of the era and documents a series of events highlighting a historical nascent dystopia.
It is no coincidence that Douglas often chooses to locate his work where failures of political and social systems are most apparent. Douglas' preoccupation with failed utopias and the obsolete of the post-war North American period, is not about a redemption of past occurrences, but rather, as the artist says, a way to reconsider them, to understand why these utopian moments did not fulfil themselves, what larger forces kept a local moment a minor moment: what was valuable there - and what might still be useful today.
Born in Vancouver in 1960, Stan Douglas has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Recent venues for solo exhibitions include the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, Stan Douglas, 2016; Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida, Stan Douglas: Luanda-Kinshasa, 2016; Salzburger Kunstverein, Salzburg, Austria, Stan Douglas: The Secret Agent, 2016; Wiels, Centre d'Art Contemporain, Brussels, Stan Douglas: Interregnum, 2015; Museu Coleçäo Berardo, Lisbon Stan Douglas: Interregnum, 2015; Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Stan Douglas, 2014–2015; Carré d'Art - Musée d'Art Contemporain, Nîmes, Stan Douglas: Photography 2008, 2013, solo, travelling to Haus der Kunst, Munich, 2014; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen, 2015 and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2015; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, New Pictures 7: Stan Douglas: Then and Now, 2013, and the Moscow Photobiennale 2013, Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio, 2013. His work has been presented at Aargauer Kunsthaus, Switzerland, Cinema mon amour, 2017; Hayward Gallery, London (off-site exhibition The Infinite Mix: Sound and Image in Contemporary Video, 2016–2017; Audain Art Museum, Whistler, Intersections: Contemporary Artist Films 2016; The Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Art and Music, 1965 to Now, 2016; Museum der Moderne Salzburg, Austria, Art/Histories, 2014; 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. Stan Douglas is the recipient of the 2016 Hasselblad Award.
Text courtesy Victoria Miro.