Stan Douglas and the Aesthetic Critique of Urban Decline

Abstract

Over the past two decades, Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas has produced an evolving body of photographic, slide projection and sound, and film and video installation projects. From nascent large-scale panoramic landscape photographs to intellectually probing multimedia narratives on urbanism's transformations, his works persistently excavate the social, political, and epistemological arbitrariness of modernity's claim to progress. Douglas locates his muse in the decrepit past and fabricates, through technical and material means, visual spaces where irrepressible difficulties and dangers, saliencies, and pleasures emerge. Like the best contemporary visual art forms, Douglas's film and video installations are highly cognitive and perceptual, designed for experience and completion by unforeseeable meanings the viewer may produce. This article explores the implications of Stan Douglas's work for rethinking the social and cultural contexts of education today.

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