Film UbuWebStan Douglas (b. 1960)
Deux devises & Onomatopoeia (1983)
Television Spots / Monodramas (1987-1991)
Der Sandmann (1995)
Nu•tka• (1996)
Win, Place or Show (1998)
Suspiria (2003)
Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably, Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects.
Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, where he continues to live and work. He was one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993. The artist’s latest project, Luanda-Kinshasa, debuted at David Zwirner, New York, marking his twelfth gallery solo show (on view January 9 to February 22, 2014).
In 2013, a major survey of the artist’s recent work, Stan Douglas: Photographs 2008-2013, was presented at Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes, France. The exhibition travels as Stan Douglas: Mise en scène to Haus der Kunst in Munich, where it is currently on view through October 12, 2014. In 2015, the show will tour to the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Another solo exhibition of Douglas’s work is planned for fall 2014 at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh.
Premiering in March 2014 at the Arts Club Theatre Company in Vancouver, Helen Lawrence is a new multimedia theatre work conceived by Douglas. Created in close collaboration with acclaimed screenwriter Chris Haddock, the project innovatively merges theatre, visual art, live-action filming, and computer-generated imagery. Douglas worked with a team of 3D artists and programmers to virtually construct the set, which will further be available to audience members to explore in advance through a 3D augmented reality app called Circa 1948 produced by the National Film Board of Canada.
In 2012, Douglas received the prestigious Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York. He was recently the recipient of the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award in 2013. A solo exhibition was organized on its occasion and shown earlier this year at the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto, as part of the 2014 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival.
Over the past decade, Douglas’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including the Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris (2013); Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota (2012); The Power Plant, Toronto (2011); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2004); and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002).
Major museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.