Douglas, Stan

Stan Douglas is a multidisciplinary artist whose photographs, films, and installations explore the intersection of fact and fiction. His work investigates pivotal moments in history where social unrest and cultural incongruency precipitate change, and he especially focuses on the impact of political turbulence on major cities. Along with photographers Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham, Douglas is associated with the Vancouver School of photo-conceptualism. This loosely defined term came about in the 1980s to group together artists whose complex photographs and films respond to how mass media alters the power of conceptual art.

Often referencing the literary constructs of Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, and Herman Melville as well as the films of diverse Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Wells, Douglas is interested in the power of media to construct our collective reality and what he describes as “failed utopias and obsolete technologies.” He identifies as Black-Canadian yet he has only directly touched on race in a few works. Instead, he often deals with concerns of race, cultural invisibility, and imperialism through explorations of Black musical traditions of blues and jazz.

Stan Douglas was born in Vancouver, Canada and received his BFA from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1982. He was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museums Hugo Boss Prize in 1996 and was selected to represent Canada in the 2021 Venice Biennale. Douglas’s work has been exhibited in Serpentine Gallery, London; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Power Plant, Toronto; and various others. His work is held in permanent collections around the world, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Art Gallery of Ontario; and more.