Author Description

This volume assembles a range of photography and 14 moving-image pieces from the course of Stan Douglas's career. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, born in Vancouver in 1960, the book is arranged according to different potential readings of Douglas's work and his interpretations of history, film and music. The artworks are redolent with allusions to the suppressed and the failed, lost Modernist utopias from the autonomous subject to government housing. For example, Le Detroit looks at the "haunted castle" in its modern variant, the project high-rise. Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin B.C. refers to silent film and the mechanical piano; Win, Place or Show crosses 1950s home decor with 1960s television; and Evening traces the inception of infotainment in the outgoing 1960s. Douglas is represented in New York by David Zwirner gallery. His work was recently exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Studio Museum, Harlem.