One of Canada's great artists is back with a project that explores Vancouver's historical hotels, gambling dens and beer halls
"There's more truth in the lie than in the documentary," Stan Douglas tells me. We're standing in a cavernous New York art gallery, gazing up at one of his larger photographs, a hyperreal panoramic tableau of West Indian men playing cricket in a Vancouver park. The title is Cricket Pitch, 1951—but it wasn’t shot then. It was photographed in 2010, and while it purports to be a traditional vintage print, it actually combines multiple shots with digital technology that makes Photoshop look like amateur hour.
Nothing's ever simple in Douglas's images, but that's the only way he knows how to work. "Because of technology, nobody believes any more that a photograph is real. But that just means that we have to take more responsibility as creators of images. We can't just say, 'Oh, this happened to be there when I was there.' You have to take ownership. It's always a construction, no matter what."
Douglas, whose films, videos and photography have given him as strong a claim as anyone to the title of Canada's greatest artist, is back in New York this week to unveil his latest work, a murder-mystery film noir titled Circa 1948. Instead of appearing at a gallery, Douglas has taken Circa 1948 to the Tribeca Film Festival, where it’s one of the highlights of this year’s massive selection. It is the artist’s first appearance in a cinematic setting, but what’s even more surprising is that Circa 1948 isn’t really a film at all. It’s an interactive and bafflingly intricate multimedia project, and its images, though disturbingly lifelike, have all been digitally rendered. In New York, festivalgoers can use their bodies to navigate the spaces of postwar Vancouver, and starting this week, anyone with an iOS device can download Circa 1948 for free.