The exhibition Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories, the latest in Vancouver artist Stan Douglas’s recombinant narrative projections, opens at the Art Gallery of York University with a public reception on April 19.
Left: An image from Inconsolable Memories, a film installation by Stan Douglas that springs from his research on post-revolutionary Cuba
The reception takes place from 6 to 9pm in the gallery’s new space on the ground floor of York’s Accolade East building. The event will feature a conversation at 7pm between Douglas and gallery director Philip Monk about the artist’s new Cuba project.
Inconsolable Memories is a double-projection film based on Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 Memories of Underdevelopment. Douglas updates the original from its Bay of Pigs era to the Mariel expulsions and uses Alea’s flashback structure. Douglas also mimicks Alea’s mix of documentary and fictional footage.
One of the two AGYU galleries at Accolade East will be devoted to the film installation; the other will exhibit Douglas’s large-scale colour photographs of the re-purposed buildings of Havana and surroundings. A catalogue with essays by Sven Lütticken and Philip Monk is available.
Vamos mes amigos
From downtown, viewers can hitch a ride to the York reception with artist, writer and curator Luis Jacob April 19 on the performance bus from the Art Gallery of Ontario (corner of Dundas and McCaul streets) at 6pm. Return downtown with curator and film scholar Susan Lord, who will talk about But It is Not the End: The Experimental Ethnography of Nicolás Guillén Landrián screening at the Cinematheque Ontario at 9pm.
May 7 tour
Monk will give a tour May 7 at 2pm of Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories as part of this year’s Contact Toronto Photography Festival. A free bus departs from the Drake Hotel (corner of Beaconsfield and Queen Street West) at 1pm and returns downtown at 4pm.
Inconsolable Memories is a co-production of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, with support from the Canada Council for the Arts. The exhibition is presented at AGYU with generous financial support from Rogers Communications Inc.