Stan Douglas
24 Nov 2006 - 22 Jan 2007
STAN DOUGLAS
November 24, 2006 – January 22, 2007
In his film and photo works, the Canadian artist Stan Douglas combines conceptual strategies from the 1970s with a contemporary and highly distinctive visual idiom. In a process of deciphering, he disconnects images from their original sequences and reassembles them, often in ways that go against their original readings. For the Secession, Douglas is working on a new film project centering on the story of a murder at the height of the gold rush in the West Canadian region of the Cariboo. The focus is less on the police search for the culprit than on the different ways the crime is seen by those involved. As well as unfolding the plot through the different points of view of the protagonists, Douglas also shows deviations in the content of their versions depending on how much time has elapsed since the events and on their individual intentions. In this way, the multi-perspective patchwork forms a dense narrative and acoustic weave, similar to the film within a film used by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon to capture the fragmented nature of reality. In Douglas’ films, lyricism and intellectual challenge stand in constructive opposition. The formal exactness with which his works are composed is mirrored in a precision both conceptual and in terms of content that makes his oeuvre one of the most outstanding in contemporary art.
Stan Douglas (*1960) lives and works in Vancouver.
November 24, 2006 – January 22, 2007
In his film and photo works, the Canadian artist Stan Douglas combines conceptual strategies from the 1970s with a contemporary and highly distinctive visual idiom. In a process of deciphering, he disconnects images from their original sequences and reassembles them, often in ways that go against their original readings. For the Secession, Douglas is working on a new film project centering on the story of a murder at the height of the gold rush in the West Canadian region of the Cariboo. The focus is less on the police search for the culprit than on the different ways the crime is seen by those involved. As well as unfolding the plot through the different points of view of the protagonists, Douglas also shows deviations in the content of their versions depending on how much time has elapsed since the events and on their individual intentions. In this way, the multi-perspective patchwork forms a dense narrative and acoustic weave, similar to the film within a film used by Akira Kurosawa in Rashomon to capture the fragmented nature of reality. In Douglas’ films, lyricism and intellectual challenge stand in constructive opposition. The formal exactness with which his works are composed is mirrored in a precision both conceptual and in terms of content that makes his oeuvre one of the most outstanding in contemporary art.
Stan Douglas (*1960) lives and works in Vancouver.