Additional Images

Provenance:

©Stan Douglas. Courtesy of the artist; Victoria Miro, London and Venice; David Zwirner, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong.

The Work & Artist Bio

Nootka Cannery Wharf, 1996, from the “Nootka Sound” series, is a colour photograph from a set of 30 prints. A set was purchased in 1997 for the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. In an interview in frieze in 2007, Stan Douglas told Robert Enright that he was conscious of doing an anti-Group of Seven piece and wanted to show a landscape that was full of human presence, Indigenous as well as European. The images are evidence of that layered occupation; a deactivated logging road, a swamp created by the run-off from logging, a well built by the Spanish in the 18th century, a 3000-year-old stone-walled fish trap, the replica of a longhouse inside a Catholic Church, and a rock painting of a Hummingbird/Cormorant. Nootka Cannery Wharf is another of those traces. The cannery was built in 1897 and was such a successful fish processing operation that it was active 24 hours a day. Douglas’s photograph shows the remnants of the wharf, now a series of collapsing wooden frames. A beautiful remnant, it presents history as a still life.

Stan Douglas is a visual artist who lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles. His films and photographs have been included in exhibitions internationally since the early 1980s, including at documenta IX, X and XI (1992, 1997, 2002) and in four Venice Biennales (1990, 2001, 2005, 2019, representing Canada in 2022). A survey of his work, “Stan Douglas: Mise en scène,” toured Europe from 2013 until the end of 2015. From 2014 until 2017 his multimedia theatre production Helen Lawrence was presented in Vancouver, Toronto, Munich, Antwerp, Edinburgh, Brooklyn and Los Angeles. Douglas received the International Centre for Photography’s Infinity Prize in 2012; the Scotiabank Photography Award in 2013; the Hasselblad Award in 2016; the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2019 and the Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Minister of Culture in 2021. From 2004 to 2006 he was a professor at Universität der Künste Berlin and is currently Chair of the Graduate Art Program of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California. Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles. He is represented by Victoria Miro, London and Venice and David Zwirner, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Hong Kong.

History Maker, Border Crossings Issue 155, 2020

Stan Douglas, Border Crossings Issue 119, 2011

Stan Douglas: Cuba Photographs, Border Crossings Issue 99, 2006

David Zwirner

Victoria Miro