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Stan Douglas, video and installation artist, photographer (b at Vancouver 1960) Douglas graduated from the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1982, and was included the following year in the Vancouver Art Gallery's important survey Vancouver: Art and Artists 1931-1983. The slide/sound installation Deux Devises of 1982-83 offers an early key to his concerns, juxtaposing a 19th-century love song by Charles Gounod with slide-dissolves to lyrics as typed translation with English subtitles on an empty screen; the second segment shows Douglas's own mouth forming the words to a soundtrack of Robert Johnson's "Preachin' Blues" from 1936. This contrast of salon sensibility and blues lament is jarring and acute, a challenge to both identity and cultural assumptions or standards. As a black growing up in a predominantly white culture, Douglas has noted his sense of underlying alienation, a self unreflected in the surround of popular images.
Characteristic Technology
His research and use of historic film, photography and music as characteristic technology and theme has continued. The installation Onomatopoeia , included in the National Gallery of Canada's centennial exhibition Songs of Experience (1986), brought him new attention. An old-fashioned player piano is combined with projected images of disused tools, weaving machines and their punch-cards (so much like the player-piano rolls). The accompanying Beethoven sonata (played by the piano) recalls the ragtime of American Scott Joplin: once again, an evocation of times past and meditation on history and society, pleasure and drudgery, high and low culture. With Television Spots (1987-88) and Monodramas (1991), Douglas made interventions in the television context; less than a minute long, the video works were as brief as ads but singularly "noncommercial" in tone. The double-sided video projection Hors-Champs (1992), produced with the Musé National d'Art Modern in Paris, offered further comment on television styles, in this case the classic manner of Jean-Christophe Averty in 1960s France. At the same time Hors-Champs celebrated the "free jazz" played in those years by displaced American blacks, while noting their virtual exile in Europe at the time. Douglas continues to attract the support of museums internationally: the 3-channel video installation Evening (1994) was commissioned by The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, and the Der Sandmann (1995) film installation was produced in Berlin.
 Hors-Champs1992, installation by Stan Douglas at the ICA, London, 1994 (courtesy David Zwirner Gallery, New York).
Curatorial Work
In 1988 Douglas curated the authoritative Samuel Beckett: Teleplays for the Vancouver Art Gallery, an exhibition which subsequently toured Canada, the US, Australia, France and Italy. He also organized an important series of lectures on contemporary art in Vancouver, which he edited to appear as the book Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art. Douglas has enjoyed exceptional response to his work since the late 1980s, being featured at Documenta IX (Kassel, 1992), the Sydney Biennale (1990, 1996), the Centre Pompidou's touring Passages de l'Image (1990) and the Biennale de Lyon (1995), as well as having major solo exhibitions at museums in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the US and Canada. His research and care for both production and presentation are comprehensive, making engagement and intellectual challenge a pleasure.
Author
PEGGY GALE
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