An exhibition of new photographic work by Vancouver artist Stan Douglas, reexamining historical, site-specific layers, particularly the imaging of postwar North American diversions from cabaret to sports.
The Malabar People, a series of sixteen black-and-white portraits of the patrons and staff of a fictional 1950s nightclub. The patrons range from single women to loggers, and the staff encompass bartenders, waitresses and entertainers (a dancer, a female impersonator, a musician). Accompanying them are additional photographs from Midcentury Studio that provide a further context for period entertainment including a multiple exposure image of a dancer, photographs of stage magic tricks or sleight of hand, and large-scale images of hockey and cricket events. Together, the works reveal a highly mixed demographic. The works were shot in Vancouver, and although the locations are not always revealed, the city not only plays itself but stands in for a midcentury every city. The notion of entertainment is entwined with a postwar optimism, while at the same time inflected with darker ramifications of looking back.
Since the late 1980s, Douglas 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. Making frequent use of new as well as outdated technologies, Douglas appropriates existing Hollywood genres (including murder mysteries and the Western) and borrows from classic literary works (notably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.
Douglas’s midcentury alter-ego revokes the career of the legendary photographer Arthur Fellig, also known as Weegee (1899-1968). Self-taught, Weegee typically photographed at night, always using the same heavy camera, exposure time, and flash; he is particularly known for his documentation of the New York nightscape in the years surrounding the Second World War. In addition, Douglas also refers to the relatively unknown work of Raymond Munro, a Canadian war veteran who became a photojournalist without any photographic education or experience, and to the New York-based Black Star photo agency founded in the mid-1930s (whose archives are now housed at Ryerson University in Toronto), which frequently employed photographers with little formal training, but nonetheless came to influence the field of photographic reportage for many decades.
Stan Douglas, Entertainment: Selections from Midcentury Studio
Until March 4, 2012
The Power Plant
231 Queens Quay W
Toronto, Ontario M5J 2G8
