For Video artist Stan Douglas, the moment is always a multiple, layered event. Each moment speaks in chorus -- sometimes in harmony, sometimes not, but always in provocative juxtaposition. Take his 1994 piece entitled "Evening." On three screens that are almost...
[more]For Video artist Stan Douglas, the moment is always a multiple, layered event. Each moment speaks in chorus -- sometimes in harmony, sometimes not, but always in provocative juxtaposition.
Take his 1994 piece entitled "Evening." On three screens that are almost cinematic in scope, three stations deliver the evening news, all from 1969. At first, one might think that his aim is to transport us back to that very pivotal year by presenting us with its news. But Douglas' focus is the moment when "happy talk" came into being; the era when news anchors developed a style that they hoped would create a happier experience for their audience. The three broadcasts are examples of different stages of "happy talk" development. At times, they deliver news simultaneously, causing a chaotic layering of disparate deliveries.
In the 1992 "Hors-champs," Douglas simultaneously presents two separate sets of footage of the same free-jazz concert. On one screen, the viewer sees a final, edited cut; on another screen, shot from a different angle, the viewer sees all the material which was edited out of the first version. In 1996's "Nu-tka," pictures of the Canadian landscape move in and through each other while different narrators tell historical tales. Occasionally, everything -- the voices and the images -- are in sync; most of the time, there's a kind of dissonant rendering of the here and now. For Douglas, the moment is always split into simultaneous events, a multiplicity which forms a singular.
Perhaps the locus of this multiplicity is the viewer, who sees one thing with one eye and something totally different with the other; who hears one thing with one ear and something else entirely with the other. Perhaps the moment is already divided at the precise moment it is experienced.
Born in 1960 in Vancouver, Douglas is considered one of the foremost Video artists of the 1990s. His art has been shown everywhere from Korea to South Africa to Venezuela. The Pompidou in Paris launched a major retrospective of his work, and he is a regular name at the Whitney Biennial. Furthermore, Britain's prestigious Phaidon press recently issued a book of his work, while naming him one of the top twenty contemporary artists in the world.
[show less]
