Stan Douglas

The binomial silent film and sound narration or added soundtrack is the starting point to the structural base of Overture and Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin BC. For them, he uses materials, mechanisms and resources from the origins of cinematography: in Overture he uses Edison Brothers movies on a journey through the Rocky Mountains, in 1899 and 1901; and in Pursuit, Fear, Catastrophe: Ruskin BC a new transcription from the work of Arnold Schoenberg: Musical Accompaniment to a Film Scene (1929-1930) constitutes its soundtrack. On the other hand, the ten micro-fragments that make up Monodramas respond to a commercial advertisement model, a linear narrative structure and which have almost absurd themes. These, designed to be placed between advertisements without explanation, "produce a crisis in the audience, breaking the spectator’s viewing habits and disrupting the continuity of television programmes," according to exhibition curator Christine van Assche.

As for Hors-champ, the subject of the video is a recording of a free-jazz or New Thing piece that, as Douglas himself points out, is an "expressive idiom of Afro-American music characterised by simultaneous improvisation by the whole group and by a relatively harmonic freedom". It refers to a musical trend that emerged in France in the 1960s and fell into disuse years later. Recorded live and the way musical productions for television were made at the time, Hors-champ is projected on two screens simultaneously on each side: on one the final recording is shown and on the other all that was edited out, proposing a sort of counter-narrative. In these four pieces presented, Douglas heads four moments in the history of the twentieth century, his works place him at the beginning of a new era in the history of representation and in the construction of subjectivity, while insisting on a conversion between the media of communication and the media of artistic production.