Stan Douglas
Abandonment and Splendour
September 26, 2013–January 17, 2014
Canadian Cultural Centre
5 rue de Constantine
75007 Paris, France
Hours: Monday–Friday 10am–6pm
Free admission
T + 33 1 44 43 21 90
www.canada-culture.org
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A retrospective look at the photographic work produced by Stan Douglas in the last decade of the twentieth century, Abandonment and Splendour explores the ruins of certain great Western utopias in their paradoxical beauty. The exhibition focused on four series haunted by a history between light and shadow that the image does not explain but evokes with the poetic suspense that is the artist’s hallmark. While the photographs of Ruskin Photos, Potsdamer Schrebergärten, Nootka Sound and Detroit Photos are intimately tied to film and video installations based on these places, they also collectively comprise a mysterious and unsettling representation of the power and opacity of the image. Abandonment and Splendour brings together thirty-six works produced in the 1990s. It chooses to confront the viewer with the most silent part of an oeuvre that deploys itself elsewhere in the moving image and sound. Separated from the installations that they often accompany, Stan Douglas’ photographs here display their own density, at a remove from the narrative of the installation. From this ensemble emerges a disturbing splendour fictitiously devoid of any presence other than that of the artist.
Curator: Catherine Bédard
