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b. 1960, Vancouver
Stan Douglas was born on October 11, 1960, in Vancouver. An African Canadian, he grew up in a white middle-class neighborhood in Vancouver. He attended the Emily Carr College of Art and Design in the same city from 1979 to 1982. In 1982–83, he made installations with projected slides, which he presented in movie theaters. Around this time, he destroyed his earlier work as an impetus to start anew.
In 1983, Douglas began reading the complete oeuvre of Samuel Beckett, an undertaking that some time later launched an exhibition and catalogue developed by Douglas on the playwright's work for television and film. This exhibition toured in 1988–92. In the mid- to late 1980s, Douglas made still photographs, worked in film (incorporating found footage into his own loops), and started to use video. His large photograph Panoramic Rotunda was shown in a 1985 solo show at the artist-operated Or Gallery in Vancouver, where Douglas would serve on the board in the late 1980s. In video works of the 1980s, Douglas addressed such complex subjects as the lasting repercussions of historical events, issues of racial and class difference, how film and media operate as modes of communication, and the impact of linguistics.
In 1989, his first series of short works for television, the twelve Television Spots, were broadcast in Saskatoon and Ottawa amid regular programming, as if they were commercials. Unidentified, the short scenes depicting open-ended, banal activities baffled viewers. In 1992, Douglas's Monodramas were broadcast on Toronto and Vancouver television to a similar effect. The artist edited and designed the book Vancouver Anthology: The Institutional Politics of Art, published in 1992. That year, Douglas worked in Paris as the guest of the Centre Georges Pompidou, where he created Hors-champs, which looks at the free jazz developed by African American expatriates in Paris in the 1960s.
While researching his 1993 film Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin, B.C., Douglas created a related series of photographs, a process typical of his working style. In 1997–98, he spent a great deal of time in Detroit, working on a series of photographs, Detroit Photos, that document this American city, which he had been shocked to find so devastated. A related film installation, Le Detroit, was completed in 1999. Through the Detroit projects, he pursued an interest in "failed utopias" and the interrelationships between people and America's urban spaces. By 1998, Douglas had introduced computer-generated, random ordering into his videos, creating seemingly endless, subtle variations within single works.
Solo shows of Douglas's art have been organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto (1987 and 1994), Mus�e National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (1994), Milwaukee Art Museum (1994), and the Vancouver Art Gallery (1999), among other venues. His work has also been included in numerous group exhibitions, including the Biennale of Sydney (1990 and 1996), Venice Biennale (1990 and 2001), Documenta (1992, 1997, and 2002), Biennale d'Art Contemporain de Lyon (1995 and 1997), Whitney Biennial (1995), Carnegie International (1995), Berlin Biennale (1998), and Moving Pictures at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2002 and 2003). In 1989, Douglas was an artist-in-residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He was awarded a grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst to work in Berlin in 1994. In 1996, Douglas was a finalist for the Guggenheim Museum's inaugural Hugo Boss Prize, and in 2001 he was awarded the Arnold Bode Prize. The artist lives and works in Vancouver.
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