Stan Douglas Exhibition

The Fruitmarket Gallery presents a solo exhibition of the work of Stan Douglas, who came to international prominence in the mid–1990s when his film installation Der Sandmann (1995) was the highlight of Documenta X (1997).

Born in 1960 in Vancouver, Canada, Douglas is known for films, photographs and installations which use new and outdated technologies, the tropes of cinema and TV, the conventions of various Hollywood genres and classic literary texts to examine the intersection of history and memory in evocative, mesmerising works.

This exhibition presents Douglas's films and photographs ranging from Der Sandmann to the just-completed The Second Hotel Vancouver (2014) which will be exhibited for the first time at The Fruitmarket Gallery.

Also included is the video installation Vidéo (2007), a reimagining of both Orson Welles's film The Trial (itself based on Kafka's novel of the same name) and Beckett's film Film, as well as photographs from Midcentury Studio (2010-11), a recent series of photographs taken by Douglas posing as a fictional North American post-war press photographer.

The most recent works in the exhibition foreground Douglas's interest in the constructed nature of photographic 'reality'. Corrupt Files (2013) which are large photographs of beautiful, almost painterly abstract images, are material renderings of pure digital data, whilst Hogan's Alley and its companion piece The Second Hotel Vancouver (both 2014), are computer generated renderings that look like incredibly detailed historical photographs, both made as the 'set' for Helen Lawrence, one of Douglas's most ambitious works to date.

Together these works provide either a rich introduction to, or a reminder of the practice of Stan Douglas whose investigations into mistaken identity and unstable memory, reconstruction, reinvention and the long shadows the past cast into the present, make him one of the most interesting and important artists of our time.