Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas's investigation into technology's role in image making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory, has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Since the late 1980s, he has created films and photographs—and, more recently, theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects—that investigate the parameters of their mediums.

David Zwirner presents this Online Viewing Room of photographs by Douglas on the occasion of his inclusion in the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Curated by Ralph Rugoff, director of the Hayward Gallery in London, the 2019 Venice Biennale, May You Live in Interesting Times, debuts the artist’s latest video installation, Doppelgänger (2019), in addition to several works from his 2017 Blackout series of photographs. Douglas was also recently featured in the 2019 Sharjah Biennial, Leaving the Echo Chamber. 

The Viewing Room highlights photographs from two recent series, DCT (2016–ongoing) and Blackout (2017). The abstract compositions that comprise Douglas's DCT series are, in essence, synthetic pictures that look at photography as an optical image in the broadest sense. The artist's investment in the nature of photographic representation in relation to reality is equally illustrated in his narrative series Blackout. In the Blackout photographs, Douglas has scripted and staged scenes from a hypothetical present-day emergency scenario of a total loss of power in New York City.

His new film installation, Doppelgänger, takes another alternate reality as its point of departure. Displayed on two square-format, translucent screens, each of which can be viewed from both sides, the looped narrative unfolds in side-by-side vignettes that depict events on worlds that are light-years apart.

From intimate filmic glimpses to fractured narratives and abstract manifestations of data, each of Douglas's series probes the relationship between human and mechanical memory.

Image: Stan Douglas, Doppelgänger, 2019 (still). © Stan Douglas