EDINBURGH.- The Fruitmarket Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the work of Stan Douglas, who came to international prominence in the mid–1990s when his film installation Der Sandmann (1995) was the highlight of Documenta X (1997). Born in 1960 in Vancouver, Canada, Douglas is known for films, photographs and installations which use new and outdated technologies, the tropes of cinema and TV, the conventions of various Hollywood genres, and classic literary texts to examine the intersection of history and memory in evocative, mesmerising artworks.
This exhibition presents a selection of Douglas’s films and photographs ranging from Der Sandmann to just-completed works exhibited for the first time at The Fruitmarket Gallery.
Also included is the video installation Vidéo (2007), a reimagining of both Orson Welles’s film The Trial (itself based on Kafka’s novel of the same name) and Beckett’s film Film, as well as photographs from Midcentury Studio (2010-11), a series of photographs taken by Douglas posing as a fictional North American post-war press photographer.
The most recent works in the exhibition foreground Douglas’s interest in the constructed nature of photographic ‘reality’. Corrupt Files (2013) which are large photographs of beautiful, almost painterly abstract images are material renderings of pure digital data whilst Hogan’s Alley and its companion piece The Second Hotel (both 2014), made as the ‘set’ for Helen Lawrence and one of Stan Douglas’s most ambitious works to date, are computer generated renderings that look like incredibly detailed historical photographs.
Together these works provide either a rich introduction to or a reminder of the practice of Stan Douglas whose investigations into mistaken identity and unstable memory, reconstruction, reinvention and the long shadows the past cast into the present, make him one of the most interesting and important artists of our time.
Stan Douglas (1960), Vancouver, lives and works in Vancouver. Douglas studied at Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver (1982). Recent solo exhibitions include: Stan Douglas: Mise en scène, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany; Stan Douglas: Helen Lawrence (cinematic stage production conceived and directed by the artist), Canadian Stage, Toronto, Canada; Scotiabank Photography Award: Stan Douglas, Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto, Canada as part of the 2014 Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival; Luanda-Kinshasa, David Zwirner, New York (all 2014); Stan Douglas: Photography 2008 – 2013, Carré d’Art - Musée d’Art Contemporain, Nîmes, France, travelling to Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany (2014); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2015); ); Disco Angola, Victoria Miro, London; New Pictures 7: Stan Douglas: Then and Now, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minnesota, United States; Abandonment and Splendour, Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris; and Midcentury Studio, Central Exhibition Hall Manege, part of Moscow Photobiennale (all 2013).
He has exhibited extensively internationally including Documenta IX, 1992; Documenta X, 1997; Documenta XI, 2002 and the Venice Biennale in 1990, 2001 and 2005. 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.
