ART CITIES: Edinburgh–Stan Douglas
Stan Douglas is known for films, photographs and installations which use new and outdated technologies, the tropes of cinema and TV, the conventions of various Hollywood genres and classic literary texts to examine the intersection of history and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 that was a highlight at the Documenta X 1997, to the just-completed The Second Hotel Vancouver (2014) which will be exhibited for the first time at The Fruitmarket Gallery.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: The Fruitmarket Gallery Archive
Also included is the video installation Vidéo (2007), a reimagining of both Orson Welles’s film “The Trial” (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. Different questions arise in the photographic series Malabar People (2011), portraits of staff and patrons of a semi-fictional 1950s Vancouver nightclub. The most recent works in the exhibition foreground Douglas’s interest in the constructed nature of photographic ‘reality’. The abstract series of photographs Corrupt Files (2013) are prints of damaged digital image files, truthful as data but unrecognizable when compared to their original images. From a distance, they have an affinity with abstract painting, but they contain within them none of the conventional gestures of painting. 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. Circa 1948 is a free app created by Douglas in which you can explore the exterior and interior world of Hogan’s Alley and The Second Hotel Vancouver. Made during the development of Helen Lawrence, characters from the two neighbourhoods take you through the rooms of the hotel and the gambling dens and beer halls of the alley.
Info: The Fruitmarket Gallery, 45 Market Street, Edinburgh, Duration: 7/11/14-15/2/15, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 1:00-17:30, Sun 12:00-16:30, http://fruitmarket.co.uk
