He is representing Canada at the Venice Biennale with photos about riots and a video about grime
The Canadian artist Stan Douglas lives between Vancouver, where he has his studio, and Los Angeles, where he heads the graduate art programme at Pasadena’s ArtCenter College of Design. His favourite record stores, though, are in London and Berlin: Sounds of the Universe in Soho, and its in-house label Soul Jazz, are an unparalleled resource of funk, soul, reggae and dubstep; Hard Wax in Berlin is the sanctioned centre of techno.
Music has permeated Douglas’s life: he was named after the jazz performer Stan Kenton and fell in love with John Coltrane early on. Studying fine art in Vancouver in the late 1970s, he started making slideshows, then films, using archive materials. On Friday nights he DJ’d in a local gay bar, splicing Herbie Hancock tracks he’d picked up in New York into other hits, reviving the venue’s fortunes in the process.
Since then, in his film works, Douglas has often used music to elaborate on the sticky issues of race, class and social inequality. An early audio and slide projection work — “Deux Devises” (1983) — questions assumptions of European superiority, “measuring” a formal 19th-century ballad against the febrile improvisational blues of Robert Johnson. A fictional recording session in “Luanda-Kinshasa” (2013) imagines what would have happened if Miles Davis had discovered Afrobeat.
“Music,” says Douglas, over Zoom from his kitchen in LA, “is a time-based medium and a model of how people share time together. Film is too.” This year, Douglas will be bringing both to the Venice Biennale, where he is representing Canada, having been commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada.