Stan Douglas’s 2006 photo of the Barkerville Masonic Lodge.Stan Douglas/McMichael Canadian Art Collection/Supplied
Researching historic resource extraction in the British Columbia Interior, Vancouver artist Stan Douglas once visited Barkerville and was disappointed to discover a gold rush theme park. He produced only one work from that visit, a 2006 photo of the Barkerville Masonic Lodge, which the Masons had kept in use.
This image, of one real thing in the midst of the ersatz, is now showing at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont., part of an exhibition devoted to Douglas’s photographic series from 1996 to the present, curated by gallery director Sarah Milroy.
Documentary and fiction, the observed and the staged, are two strands in his work that emerge powerfully from the show.
On one side of the Masonic Lodge, there are other landscapes in his Western series: The remnants of Walhachin, a town of prefab houses facing a mountain that is gradually being quarried away, and the vast landscape around Spences Bridge, marked by telephone poles, piles of lumber and an old church.
But there are also examples of Douglas’s own inventions, portraits of fictional tough guys from Klatsassin, a 2006 photo and film project that deals with the Chilcotin War, an 1864 revolt by the Tsilhqot’in against mining development.
Interior of the Church at Yuquot, 1996. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.Stan Douglas/ McMichael Canadian Art Collection/Supplied
Milroy calls it Tales of Empire and argues that what unites these images is their concern with colonialism. We have Douglas’s photographs of Cuba: Technically virtuosic, acutely observed images reflecting a layered colonial history, such as the Russian embassy towering over Havana’s affluent Miramar neighbourhood or a garage with Hispanic architecture housing both American cars and a bright orange Russian Lada.
Then we have his latest, fictional work: The Enemy of All Mankind, a retelling of Polly, John Gay’s 1729 sequel to his much better known piece The Beggar’s Opera. Set in the West Indies, it features a melodramatic story of disguise, cross-dressing and sexual servitude that includes pirates and Maroons, independent people who escaped slavery.
In these grand photographs with their saturated colours, Douglas creates a remarkable hybrid of theatre, film and photography, using actors wearing costumes borrowed from the Metropolitan Opera in New York. They are stills from a film that does not yet exist.
“I’m restaging a comic opera, and I don’t have the wherewithal to film it or to stage it. And so I’m just doing it in fragments,” he said in an interview at the McMichael, explaining that he gives the actors a script and shoots them as they improvise their roles, rather than posing them. When asked what if someone gave him $50-million and told him to make a costume drama, he replied: “I’d love that.”
Still, the contrarian artist said he has concentrated on photography in recent years because people kept saying film was his strongest work.
Perhaps all this discussion of genres, media and methods just plays into Milroy’s hands, as she argues (a bit surprisingly) that the content of Douglas’s work tends to be overlooked in a focus on its form. After all, it is hard to escape the social critique offered by an artist whose early work included a 32-second video from 1991 that was inserted like an ad into TV programming: It featured a white man in a strip mall greeting a Black man as Gary only to have the latter rebuff him: “I’m not Gary.”
That video seems as obviously about race, identity and visibility as does the idea of taking Captain Macheath from Polly, a white character hiding behind blackface, and flipping the script to make him a Black man who is passing for white.
And yet, Douglas tells a story about two very confused 1990s TV viewers who questioned I’m Not Gary, but, when told it was art, were relieved: That meant it did not need to have a meaning. If he hadn’t already, Douglas threw a sequestered art-for-art’s-sake out the window back then.
“I decided that the work would always have an element of content that could not be denied,” he said.
In the case of Polly, Douglas was attracted by Gay’s surprisingly contemporary themes: Polly is sold to a master as a courtesan but escapes by dressing as a man; the Black Maroons battle the multicultural pirates, outlaws assembled from a host of different backgrounds (but labelled as a fair target for any nation, hence the series’ title The Enemy of All Mankind.)
Following this story only through photographs, similar to the melodramatic European photo comics of old, may prove a challenge: The viewer is helped along by what Douglas refers to as “preposterous titles,” such as: Act I, Scene XIV: In which Polly, with the Help of Damaris, Convinces Mrs. Ducat to Punish Her Husband by Granting Her Her Freedom.
Act I, Scene XIV: In which Polly, with the Help of Damaris, Convinces Mrs. Ducat to Punish Her Husband by Granting Her Her Freedom, 2024. Courtesy of the artist, Victoria Miro, and David Zwirner.Stan Douglas/ McMichael Canadian Art Collection/Supplied
He is used to being asked how viewers could possibly know all his references, and the answer is, they aren’t expected to.
“I find it fascinating, a sort of a biological possibility, taking historical artifacts that someone may recognize and then doing something else with that on top of it,” he said. “So maybe the audience can only understand the new thing they’re witnessing or they may have an understanding of the previous reference I’m making, and that will give them a new perspective.”
At the McMichael, that’s a provocative call to reconsider the Canadian classics. Specifically, Douglas has placed his Nootka Sound series of 1996 outside the main exhibition, hanging it in a gallery that features several Group of Seven landscapes and pairing his work with three B.C. scenes by A.Y. Jackson. Jackson’s picturesque landscapes, with the human presence politely indicated by a few totem poles or an old house, confront dense photos that show a flooded quarry, a collapsed wooden building reverting to nature and a fish trap built into a river bank that is said to be several thousand years old.
The juxtaposition seems a perfect example of Douglas’s approach. He points out that since the 1970s, artists are always “doing culture based on culture.”
“I guess you would call it postmodernism, the idea that there’s never a pure form that you can make. You always have to build any new cultural artifact based on things that are pre-existing, and I just kind of go all the way.”
Tales of Empire continues to March 22 at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Kleinburg, Ont. It will travel to the Audain Art Museum in Whistler, B.C., in 2027, and the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College in Chicago in 2028.