BIOGRAPHY
Stan Douglas is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver. He has created films, photographs, and installations that reexamine particular locations or past events. His works often take their points of departure in local settings, from which broader issues can be identified. His interest in the social implementation of western ideas of progress, particularly utopian philosophies, is located in their often divisive political and economic effects. His interrogation of the structural possibilities of film and video, in concert with intricately developed narratives, has resulted in a number of groundbreaking contemporary art works.
Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably Samuel Beckett, Herman Melville, and Franz Kafka) to create ready-made contextual frameworks for his complex, thoroughly researched projects. Since the late 1980's his films, videos and photographs have been seen in exhibitions internationally, including Documentas IX, X and XI (1992, 1997, 2002) and three Venice Biennales (1990, 2001, 2005). Douglas's work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at prominent institutions worldwide, including a comprehensive survey, Past Imperfect: Works 1986–2007, at the Württembergischer Kunstverein and the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart (2007); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover (2004); and the Serpentine Gallery, London (2002). Work by the artist has been included in a number of recent group exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; ZKM|Museum fur Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe, Germany (both 2010); International Center of Photography, New York (2009 and 2008); Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (2008); Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2007); amongst others.
Major museum collections which hold works by the artist include the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Tate Gallery, London; Vancouver Art Gallery; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Between 2004 and 2006 he was a professor at the Universität der Künste Berlin and is currently Core Faculty in the Graduate Department of the Art Center College of Design in California.