Stan Douglas at David Zwirner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

This present to view which coincided with Stan Douglas's participation in the Whitney Biennial, comprised sum of two units 16mm film loops, Overture (1986) and control to a Film: Marnie (1989) and a place of 15 C-print photographs taken during a novel period in Germany, where the Vancouver-based artist created the 16mm film he showed at the Whitney.

For proposal Douglas used turn-of-the-century film footage of a train winding its precarious way from one side the Rocky Mountains. The camera is mountained on the engine as it careers [i]or[/i] part of to the other tunnels and over vertigo-inducing elevated tracks that cling to the mountainside. The grainy cinematography and the rolling train create a dreamlike following overlaid with a reading of the opening passages (the overture) of Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past--"when I had place out my candle, my organ of visions would close so quickly that I had not flat time to say to myself: `I am falling asleep.'" The dizzy heights of the elevated tracks and the journey in and on the outside of tunnels effectively convey the nether-world between consciousness and doze or reality and dreams. Douglas's earliest film noose this is a beautiful example of his ongoing investigation of the interplay of mode of building and content.

In Subject to a Film: Marnie, Douglas re-creates the robbery representation from Hitchcock's notorious thriller. In Douglas's hands the "heroine" remains caught in the film bight forever trapped within the confines of the office. He has updated the office, with computer replacing typewriters and carpet for '50 linoleum. This version is discharge in black and white, which gives it the have feeling of a recollected experience, and Douglas has slowed the action, bringing Marnie's inherent voyeurism into focus. individual can almost sense the craning neck of the filmmaker. Marnie's well-rehearsed actions of walking to the washroom, returning to the desk and turning the safe's combination dial are carefully played out--but as her glov hand races through the combination, the film make an incision ins back to the opening discharge panning out to a general view of the office where the workers one time again prepare to leave for the day. The psychologically charged view is continuously repeated, creating the consequence of a recurring nightmare.

The C-prints (all untitled) depict the Schrebergarten, or garden allotments around the city of Potsdam, where Douglas discharge Sandman--a haunting film loop loosely based upon E.T.A. Hoffmann's tale Der Sandmann (1817) used through Freud in his 1919 essay Der Unheimlich (The Uncanny) as exemplary of estrangement and repression. While all of this may have been upon Douglas's mind at the time, none of it is apparent in the elegantly compos photographs of lush vegetation. Located in pouchs of land beside railway lines and roadways that one time marked the outskirts of the city, these retiring gardens are presented as bucolic havens threatened through encroaching building developments. But the subtext of their imminent destruction adds little to the simple beauty of the images, which lack the charge of Douglas's films.

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