Stan Douglas | 4Columns

The specters of historical past and pictures hang-out thirty-two works within the artist’s first US survey in over twenty years.

Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, curated by Lauren Cornell, Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York,
by means of November 30, 2025

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Édouard Manet by no means aspired to make historical past portray. But he was moved to embark on one in 1867—the 12 months the younger Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, whom France’s Napoleon III had put in as Emperor of Mexico in 1864, was executed. Outraged over Napoleon III’s abandonment of his puppet, Manet tried to seize the latter’s dying by firing squad over the course of the subsequent two years, making model after model as a relentless stream of typically conflicting information tales, illustrations, and—most significantly—pictures emerged. He ended up reducing considered one of them to items out of frustration. The downside, it appeared, needed to do with pictures per se: this new type of reportage had not, technologically talking, caught as much as the velocity of life. The snapshot was not but attainable, so photographers deployed collage, reenactment, and reconstruction to document occasions—methods not rapid sufficient to fulfill Manet’s aspiration to make sense of recent occasions.

This is the story that has been taking part in on repeat in my thoughts as I think about Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, on the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, his first US survey in over twenty years. (Part two, Metronome, that includes a considerably completely different guidelines, is happening on the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO, by means of October 11.) The title refers back to the exhibition’s opening picture, a lone stage gentle in a darkened theater, stored on, in keeping with showbiz custom, for each security causes and for the ghosts who come out to carry out as soon as everybody goes dwelling. And certainly, as evidenced by the thirty-two large-scale images, video, movie, and cameraless prints on view on the Hessel, Douglas’s work is stuffed with specters of historical past, but in addition the previous lives of the photographic medium itself.

Where Manet, again then, was laid low by pictures as a result of it couldn’t but seize the immediacy of historical past, Douglas questions its trustworthiness exactly as a result of he doubts that historical past is rapid in any respect. How can pictures doc one thing that’s by no means punctual, by no means agreed upon, by no means even acknowledged as such till all that continues to be are traces? Douglas’s answer is to grab upon occasions whose meanings are inherently unstable—he has described them as “moments when history could have gone one way or another.” Perhaps that’s the reason he reverts to early pictures’s strategies, those that pissed off Manet a lot.

Sometimes the occasion itself is just not even visualized, however is current as a haunting, as with Hogan’s Alley (2014), which bears witness to the demolition of a Black neighborhood within the artist’s hometown of Vancouver that was as soon as the positioning of an essential jazz scene. The five-by-ten-foot image is immersive, nearly cinematic, and affords a chook’s-eye view of the moonlit cityscape. The picture is a composite, stitched collectively from many particular person photos of what was primarily a digital stage set, a reimagining of the unique website by way of oral histories, information experiences, outdated pictures, and the like. Where info didn’t exist, Douglas has interpolated it—a essential deployment of what Saidiya Hartman has referred to as “critical fabulation” to take care of the silences of archives with regards to the lives of Black of us. The painstaking realism right here is the tip-off that this scene is just not “real” within the restricted phrases of up to date documentary pictures, in fact—we will see an excessive amount of, with an excessive amount of readability and sharpness, for a single lens to have caught the scene.

By getting down to make pictures of occasions which have already occurred—even when, as Douglas says, we’re nonetheless residing within the residue of these happenings—the artist leaves open the likelihood for a type of time journey in his work, a smushing collectively of previous, current, and future, of native and international, in ways in which insist on aligning the mundane and the big-H Historical. The sequence 2011 ≠ 1848, which he confirmed on the Canadian pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, is one instance: reconstructions of an Arab Spring motion in Tunis and an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York be part of a picture of rioting followers after the Vancouver Canucks misplaced a sport within the Stanley Cup finals. (My one criticism on this in any other case glorious present is that not sufficient of Douglas’s picture sequence are proven of their entirety, which dilutes their impact.) By linking these incidents, he’s not arguing that they’re essentially associated, or that they’re the unfinished enterprise of the mid-nineteenth-century pan-European staff’ uprisings alluded to within the title of the suite. Nor is he making a pat historic argument that the New York dance scene of the Seventies had something to do with the decolonization of Angola (Disco Angola, 2012), or {that a} 1912 labor gathering in Vancouver shares DNA with the crowds at a horse race in 1955 and a hippie “smoke-in” in 1971 (Crowds and Riots, 2008). But he’s not not saying any of these items, both. His understanding of historical past is infinitely porous, filled with doubts and potentialities and what-ifs, and his formal strategies each produce and account for that.

If Douglas’s recasting of pictures depends on composite methods (collage, layering, suturing), his movie and video work typically includes splitting (Hors-Champs, 1992), doubling (Der Sandmann, 1995), and looping (Luanda-Kinshasa, 2013). Nu•tka• (1996) reveals present-day Vancouver Island, the unceded territory of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht First Nations. The single picture is cut up into two separate feeds that show at completely different charges, in order that the display screen vibrates and pixelates, changing into kind of unreadable. The soundtrack, in the meantime, is doubled: two narrators—one purporting to be the Spanish explorer José Estéban Martinez, the opposite the English naval captain James Colnett—converse over and at odds with each other, which is sensible, given they have been colonizers combating over land that was not theirs. The movie is accompanied by a set of images of the island, every of which factors out in delicate ways in which it was by no means a terra nullius.

And then there’s Birth of a Nation (2025), proven right here for the primary time. It focuses on the notorious “Gus chase” from D. W. Griffith’s 1915 movie, by which Gus, a Black freedman and military captain (performed by a white actor in blackface), proposes marriage to Flora, a white girl, who, in her horror at being so besmirched, flings herself off a cliff. Flora’s brother Ben, a Klansman, chases Gus down and, together with his racist coconspirators, lynches him. One of the 5 channels of Douglas’s set up reveals Griffith’s authentic sequence; on both aspect and beneath are 4 different projections, breathtaking of their obvious visible constancy to the unique, though departing at essential factors from its narrative. Douglas pries aside Griffith’s movie, dedicating a channel to Flora, her brother, and—as a result of Gus’s perspective isn’t accounted for by Griffith—two new characters, Sam and Tom. The demeanors of the latter clarify that “Gus” was solely ever a projection of Flora and Ben’s white, racist imaginations. (Sam is proven strolling by means of the forest, minding his personal enterprise, for just about the entire thirteen-minute sequence.) Griffith used realist filmmaking strategies—revolutionary modifying, comparatively unaffected appearing kinds, and capturing outdoor—to naturalize his anti-Black propaganda. Douglas goals for the alternative, an unraveling of the methods by which filmmaking serves ideology by papering over the psychic miasma lurking beneath its seamless look. By the time we attain the tip—when, all of a sudden, one display screen switches from black-and-white to paint, and we see Tom’s physique hanging not from a tree however from a crane in a blue-screen studio, with forged and crew gathered round—pictures’s evidentiary declare is revealed for what it’s: a development, a fiction, a lure.

Aruna D’Souza is a author and critic based mostly in New York. She contributes to the New York Times and 4Columns. Her new guide, Imperfect Solidarities, was printed by Floating Opera Press final summer season.