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An exhibition of new photographic work by Vancouver artist Stan Douglas , reexamining historical, site-specific layers, particularly the imaging of postwar North American diversions from cabaret to sports.
CURATED BY MELANIE O'BRIAN, CURATOR & HEAD OF PROGRAMS
Entertainment: Selections from Midcentury Studio is an exhibition of new photographic work by Vancouver artist Stan Douglas . The work in the exhibition continues the artists practice of reexamining historical, site-specific layers, particularly the imaging of postwar North American diversions from cabaret to sports. The body of work is largely a meticulous studio project in which Douglas assumes the lens of a photographer who takes on various jobs from Weegee-esque photojournalism to advertising. A social system and an economic system of entertainment is revealed here in the artists inhabitation of a historical fiction. Achieving verisimilitude, Douglas reconstructed a studio using authentic equipment as well as hired actors to produce staged photographs that emulate the periods obsession with noir-ish drama, magic, dance, sporting events, curious artifacts, fashion, caught-in-the-moment scenes, gambling, and, of course, shifting technologies.
The exhibition includes the Malabar People, a series of sixteen black-and-white portraits of the patrons and staff of a fictional 1950s nightclub. The patrons range from single women to loggers, and the staff encompass bartenders, waitresses and entertainers (a dancer, a female impersonator, a musician). Accompanying them are additional photographs from Midcentury Studio that provide a further context for period entertainment including a multiple exposure image of a dancer, photographs of stage magic tricks or sleight of hand, and large-scale images of hockey and cricket events. Together, the works reveal a highly mixed demographic. The works were shot in Vancouver, and although the locations are not always revealed, the city not only plays itself but stands in for a midcentury every city. The notion of entertainment is entwined with a postwar optimism, while at the same time inflected with darker ramifications of looking back.
Like Douglass films, which defy straightforward narrative expectations, the artists photographs typically complicate linear and in this case, chronological reading. Examining the links between subjective impressions of a place or event and their official representations, Douglas rethinks aesthetic structures while grounding his works in the specific. The photographs in Entertainment collectively speak to notions of history and reproduction, and offer a partial portrait of a specific place and time.
Stan Douglas (born in Vancouver, 1960) has had numerous solo and group exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide. Recent solo exhibitions have taken place at kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2004), Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2007), and Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart (2007). He has been included in recent group exhibitions at such venues as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2008), International Center of Photography, New York (2008 and 2009), ZKM/Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe (2010), and Guggenheim Museum, New York (2010). His work is represented by David Zwirner, New York.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a publication that includes new texts by Louis Kaplan and Maria Muhle, a curatorial introduction by Melanie OBrian and reproductions of works in the exhibition. Professor
of History and Theory of Photography and New Media at the University of Toronto, Louis Kaplan is currently working on a book on photography and humour. A Berlin-based art historian whose research focuses on contemporary political and aesthetic theory, Maria Muhle is the co-founder of August Verlag Berlin, a publishing house for theory at the crossroads of philosophy, politics and arts.
Press Release
Artists: Stan Douglas
