Revealing Narratives

Artist Stan Douglas is renowned in Canada and internationally for his films, videos, photographs, cinematic installations and more that explore modernism and watershed moments throughout history. During his nearly 30-year practice, the Vancouver-born and based artist has created what he has often dubbed “speculative histories” by reimagining and restaging particular events, backed by an extensive research process. With both analog and digital technologies, his work investigates a multitude of narratives through the power of the image. You can see his work in Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives, on view now through November  at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, marking the first time his work has been exhibited in Atlantic Canada.  

The exhibition features two recent photo series by the artist: Penn Station’s Half Century (2021) and Disco Angola (2012). For Penn Station’s Half Century, Douglas worked with a researcher to select and recreate nine single days that took place between 1914 and 1957 in the original Pennsylvania Station in New York City, before the historic railway station was demolished. Like much of Douglas’s work, the series underscores the relevance of transitional moments, not just in time but in place as well. In a significant undertaking, Douglas recreated these scenes with “over four hundred actors who were scanned and redressed in one of five hundred unique period costumes, before being posed digitally”. This body of work was “commissioned by the Empire State Development in partnership with Public Art Fund, on the occasion of the dedication of New York City’s new Moynihan Train Hall.” 

Photograph by RAW Photography. Courtesy of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.

In Disco Angola, Douglas again takes viewers back in time to 1970s New York. In the photographs dating from 1974 and 1975, he takes on the persona of a fictional photojournalist living in the city who frequents disco nightclubs and travels to Angola to document the civil war. “The series consists of eight, large panoramic photographs, four based in Angola and four in New York” which Douglas paired together to elicit “comparisons and contrasts”. These series of photographs are situated during a critical time around the globe “marked by an oil crisis, a global market crash and increasingly strained relations between the U.S. and Soviet Union.” 

Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives was organized and first presented at the PHI Foundation for Contemporary Art in Montréal early in 2022. “Douglas’ practice is engaged in a critical exploration of the mechanics of representation,” said David Diviney, Acting Chief Curator & Deputy Director of Programs, Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, in a press statement. “Through a deep commitment to social inquiry, his photographs invite us to consider how images operate, to better understand their historical impacts, and to imagine new possibilities. This exhibition is a platform for many meaningful conversations.” Douglas is currently representing Canada at this year’s 59th Venice Biennale until November 27. He was a panellist at aabaakwad, also at this year’s Venice Bienniale in April, part of the extended programming of the Sámi Pavilion.

Stan Douglas: Revealing Narratives is on view at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia until November 6, 2022.