Stan Douglas has an international reputation for his photographs and his film and video installations. Since the late 1980s, he has been a leader in pushing the museum space toward an involvement with the projected moving image and in blurring the boundaries between visual art, cinema and television.

For this exhibition, Douglas is presenting a new film work and a series of photographs inspired by his recent trips to Cuba. The photographs were shot over the last two years and depict the recycled and often dilapidated urban architecture of Havana and its environs. Banks converted into motorcycle lots and villas transformed into schools embody the shifting economies of use under Castro’s Revolution. Douglas’ prints are immaculate and technically flawless, in obvious contrast to the ruin and entropy they portray.

Douglas’ film work Inconsolable Memories is based on the Cuban cinematic masterpiece, Memories of Underdevelopment, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea in 1968. Alea’s film portrayed the alienation of Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual caught up in the rapidly changing social reality of Cuba following the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion and the missile crisis of 1962. Douglas’ film relocates Sergio in 1980, the year of the Mariel boat exodus, when Castro allowed tens of thousands of Cubans to leave the island on a procession of boats arriving from Florida. Past and present overlap in Douglas’ film through his use of two 16mm film loops, unequal in length, but projected simultaneously onto one screen. Shots of both documentary and fictional footage combine and recombine to unravel the experience of film and to confront us with existential questions about time.

The experience of Inconsolable Memories is both poetic and intellectual. Douglas involves us in an absorbing phenomenon, in which the usual signposts are shifted, in which things veer in and out of synchronicity and in which we can safely lose our bearings. Ultimately, Douglas’ works speculate in a new way about how contemporary consciousness is shaped by history and the moving image by burrowing into the technology of film and projection and finding there intimations of our future.