The Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College is currently hosting "Stan Douglas: Ghostlight," the renowned Canadian artist's first comprehensive US survey exhibition in more than twenty years. Curated by Lauren Cornell, the exhibition features thirty-two large-scale photographs, videos, films, and cameraless prints that explore the complex relationship between historical memory and photographic representation. The show runs through November 30, 2025, with a companion exhibition titled "Metronome" featuring different works running at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, through October 11.
The exhibition's title references the opening work, which depicts a lone stage light in a darkened theater. According to showbiz tradition, this ghostlight is kept burning both for safety reasons and for the spirits who allegedly emerge to perform after everyone has gone home. This metaphor perfectly captures Douglas's artistic approach, as his work is filled with specters of history and the past lives of photography itself.
Douglas's practice draws inspiration from photography's historical limitations, particularly those that frustrated 19th-century artists like Édouard Manet. In 1867, Manet attempted to document the execution of Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, but struggled with photography's inability to capture immediate historical events. Early photography required techniques like collage, reenactment, and reconstruction to record events, strategies that weren't immediate enough for artists seeking to make sense of modern times.
Where Manet was frustrated by photography's limitations, Douglas questions the medium's trustworthiness precisely because he doubts that history itself is immediate or fixed. He focuses on events whose meanings remain inherently unstable, describing them as "moments when history could have gone one way or another." His solution involves embracing the very techniques that once frustrated earlier artists, using early photography's composite strategies to explore historical uncertainty.
One of Douglas's most powerful works, "Hogan's Alley" (2014), demonstrates this approach by bearing witness to the demolition of a Black neighborhood in Vancouver that was once home to an important jazz scene. The five-by-ten-foot immersive photograph offers a bird's-eye view of a moonlit cityscape, but the image is actually a composite stitched together from many individual pictures of what was essentially a digital stage set. Douglas reimagined the original site using oral histories, news reports, old photographs, and other archival materials. Where information didn't exist, he interpolated it, employing what scholar Saidiya Hartman calls "critical fabulation" to address the silences in archives regarding Black lives.
The painstaking realism in Douglas's work serves as a deliberate tip-off that these scenes are not "real" in the conventional terms of contemporary documentary photography. Viewers can see too much detail with too much clarity and sharpness for a single lens to have captured the scene naturally. This hyperrealism paradoxically reveals the constructed nature of all photographic representation.
Douglas's "2011 – 1848" series, which he showed at the Canadian pavilion for the 2022 Venice Biennale, exemplifies his approach to connecting historical moments across time and space. The series includes reconstructions of an Arab Spring action in Tunis and an Occupy Wall Street protest in New York, alongside an image of rioting fans after the Vancouver Canucks lost a game in the Stanley Cup finals. By linking these incidents, Douglas doesn't argue that they are necessarily related or constitute unfinished business from the mid-19th-century pan-European workers' uprisings referenced in the title.
Similarly, his "Disco Angola" (2012) series doesn't make explicit connections between the New York dance scene of the 1970s and the decolonization of Angola, and his "Crowds and Riots" (2008) doesn't directly link a 1912 labor gathering in Vancouver with crowds at a 1955 horse race and a 1971 hippie smoke-in. However, Douglas isn't entirely dismissing these potential connections either. His understanding of history remains infinitely porous, filled with doubts, possibilities, and alternative scenarios, with his formal methods both producing and accounting for this uncertainty.
While Douglas's photographic work relies on composite strategies like collage, layering, and digital suturing, his film and video pieces often involve techniques of splitting, doubling, and looping. "Nutka" (1996) shows present-day Vancouver Island, the unceded territory of the Mowachaht-Muchalaht First Nations. The single image splits into two separate feeds displaying at different rates, causing the screen to vibrate and pixelate until it becomes nearly unreadable. The soundtrack features two competing narrators—one claiming to be Spanish explorer José Estéban Martinez, the other English naval captain James Colnett—speaking over and contradicting each other, reflecting their historical roles as colonizers fighting over land that didn't belong to them.
The exhibition's most striking new work is "Birth of a Nation" (2025), shown publicly for the first time. This five-channel video installation focuses on the infamous chase sequence from D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, in which Gus, a Black freedman and army captain (portrayed by a white actor in blackface), proposes marriage to Flora, a white woman. In Griffith's racist narrative, Flora is so horrified by this proposal that she throws herself off a cliff, leading her Klansman brother Ben and his conspirators to lynch Gus.
Douglas's installation presents Griffith's original sequence on one channel while surrounding it with four additional projections that maintain visual fidelity to the original while departing crucially from its narrative. He dedicates separate channels to Flora, her brother, and—because Gus's perspective is never considered in Griffith's version—two new characters named Sam and Tom. The demeanor of these new characters makes clear that Gus was merely a projection of Flora and Ben's racist white imagination, with Sam shown simply walking through the forest and minding his own business throughout most of the thirteen-minute sequence.
Griffith used innovative realist filmmaking techniques—including groundbreaking editing, naturalistic acting styles, and outdoor shooting—to make his anti-Black propaganda appear natural and truthful. Douglas aims for the opposite effect, unraveling the ways filmmaking serves ideology by concealing the psychological turmoil beneath its seamless surface. The installation's climax comes when one screen suddenly switches from black-and-white to color, revealing Tom's body hanging not from a tree but from a crane in a blue-screen studio, with cast and crew visible around the set.
This powerful conclusion exposes photography's claim to evidentiary truth as nothing more than construction, fiction, and ultimately a trap. Through this revelation, Douglas demonstrates how supposedly objective media can perpetuate harmful ideologies while appearing to simply document reality. The exhibition as a whole challenges viewers to reconsider their assumptions about historical truth, photographic authenticity, and the complex ways these forces shape our understanding of past and present events.
