Stan Douglas

Stan Douglas often examines complex intersections of narrative, fact, and fiction while simultaneously scrutinising the media he employs and how it shapes our understanding of reality. We share the same interest in exploring the simultaneous events and alternative behaviors through narration. His works put more focus on what he calls ‘speculative histories’, imagining the scenes when a historic event happens in modern society. His photography series ‘ Scenes from the Blackout’ depicts the scenes that the physical effects of a total loss of power in present-day New York City and how people would behave in such an emergency. He employed the fiction into reality and focus on the basic human reaction to the social disaster. In his work ‘Doppelgänger’, a two-channel video projection which is about an alternative present, is a pure fiction story. The omnipresent sense of doubling that is built into the structure of the work implicitly suggests the possibility of simultaneous, diverging experiences and realities. No matter which background he roots in, it all offers a sense of uncertainty and unreality to the audience, which is related to my practice, presenting the uncanny feeling in familiar scenes.

 

My works are also interested in ‘simultaneous’, placing the conversations or actions happen at the same time in different spaces with multiple screens, like ‘Alice, Max, John, Sally, Jenny, and Will’as well as ‘The Green Light’. The watercolor series of ‘The Green Light’functions the same as ‘Scenes from the Blackout’, showing five still images happen in different time and space to break the limitation of liner-narration as well as the order of storytelling. The way how Stan Douglas use a double screen for building the narrative structure inspired me to split the story into different screens.  For example,  his work ‘Win, Place or Show (1998)’ shows one scene in two screens and expend the angle of view. The imperfect connection between two screens creates doubt of the consistency of what happens in these separated screens.