Stan Douglas at Phi Centre

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 rationale to see his present right here will not be solely that he’ll symbolize 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 chance that they quicken the blood with surprising anticipation.

Half of the pictures, from the 2021 sequence “Penn Station’s Half Century,” had been commissioned by New York Metropolis’s Moynihan Practice Corridor to memorialize forgotten moments within the unique, 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 masking 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 under 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 will not be 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 bunch of Portuguese colonists sitting outdoor with baggage packed and time to kill as they try and flee from the newly unbiased nation of Angola. Immobilized in a sequence of encounters staged for (somewhat than captured by) the digicam, every cluster of actors negates Henri Cartier-Bresson’s notion of the decisive second. Practically all of documentary images’s potential for contingency has been eviscerated from this meticulously manufactured picture. Why then, in an period when faux information hardly astonishes, do I nonetheless expertise a bristling rigidity watching these actors fake to attend for a future that got here and went way back in a second that by no means was?

— Ara Osterweil