KEVIN MOORE

Stan Douglas (b. 1960) is a Canadian artist whose work investigates technology’s role in image making and how film and photography infiltrate and shape collective memory. For this exhibition at Kemper Museum, titled Metronome, three major video works spanning Douglas’s career to date are brought together for the first time, each centered on a theme of music. For Douglas, an audiophile and former DJ, music often serves as a metaphor for social and political conditions, and as a conduit for global cultural exchange. In music, Douglas recognizes collapsed historical moments, as musicians perform compositions of the past in new configurations and interpretations. Layering these elements from the past onto the present, Douglas evokes the functions of human memory. Moreover, within the space of musical performance, a range of human experience is expressed, from social unity and harmony to conflict and discord.

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The featured works in Metronome offer a spectrum of socio-political states. ISDN (2022) presents rappers from two countries, the UK and Egypt, as they engage in a call and response across continents, using a nearly obsolete technology known as ISDN (integrated service digital network) to address aspects of social struggle and aspiration. Luanda-Kinshasa (2013) is an imagined historic jam session at the legendary Columbia 30th Street studio in Manhattan, lasting six hours and performed by musicians of different nationalities who, together, create a rapturous utopian space within the music. Douglas’s early video installation, Hors-champs (1992), features a quartet of Black expatriate musicians engaged in an unrehearsed "free jazz” session, which oscillates between moments of melody and polyphony, synchronization and dissonance. Also included are images from two important photographic series, Disco Angola (2012) and Crowds and Riots (2008–21), which delve further into themes of collective memory and cultural transference.

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A metronome is a mechanical, ticking device used by musicians to mark time at a selected rate. The pendulous sway of the metronome’s arm also serves as an apt metaphor for political fortune—for the inevitable vicissitudes of history. Unlike the rational sway of the metronome, however, history is unpredictable, lurching in different directions with little warning. Douglas’s interest in parallax—in the arbitrary associations between different moments in history, as well as the cultural confluences occurring throughout the world every day—emphasizes the randomness of events within systematic structures. Douglas’s work seeks to break down our dependence on binaries, collapsing and blending narratives and geographies into heterogeneous composites—into new compositions borrowing elements from old. In Douglas’s staged films and photographs, the act of restaging not only layers one historical event onto another, it creates fantasies based on real events for reimagined histories and a reimagined present. 

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A catalogue of the exhibition, titled Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, is published by Dancing Foxes Press in collaboration with the Center for Creative Studies (CCS), Bard College, Hessel Museum of Art, Tivoli, New York, featuring new essays by CCS Bard curator Lauren Cornell, Kevin Moore, and other prominent scholars.