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Conceptual photographer Stan Douglas is acclaimed for mining the counterfactual potential of the picture to create historic reconstructions that replicate upon the current’s fraught relation to the previous. The explanation to see his present right here just isn’t solely that he’ll signify Canada on the fifty-ninth Venice Biennale, however as a result of some his large-format, digitally collaged images on view are so pregnant with manufactured risk that they quicken the blood with surprising anticipation.
Half of the photographs, from the 2021 sequence “Penn Station’s Half Century,” have been commissioned by New York Metropolis’s Moynihan Practice Corridor to memorialize forgotten moments within the authentic, now razed, construction. Save for 2 of the scandalous personae offered in these tableaux—one a feminine outlaw, the opposite a Black labor organizer—these CGI composites merely curiosity. The opposite sequence, “Disco Angola,” 2012, is attributed to a fictional Nineteen Seventies photojournalist overlaying New York Metropolis’s disco scene and Angola’s concurrent revolutionary wrestle. In tautly choreographed works that characteristic a racially various solid of actors pictured in medias res, Douglas excavates the simmering energy struggles that dance beneath the floor of those ersatz re-creations of the previous. What the artist makes seen in his almost-too-cannily-paired photographs of launch and rise up just isn’t the revolutionary transformation promised by these moments, however their inescapable proximity to co-optation and neocolonialism. Exodus, 1975, 2012, essentially the most highly effective of those synthetic artifacts, digitally aggregates a gaggle of Portuguese colonists sitting outside with baggage packed and time to kill as they try to flee from the newly unbiased nation of Angola. Immobilized in a sequence of encounters staged for (relatively than captured by) the digital camera, every cluster of actors negates Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive second. Practically all of documentary pictures’s potential for contingency has been eviscerated from this meticulously manufactured picture. Why then, in an period when pretend information hardly astonishes, do I nonetheless expertise a bristling rigidity watching these actors faux to attend for a future that got here and went way back in a second that by no means was?
— Ara Osterweil
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