Stan Douglas, Focsa Apartment/Focsa Apartments, Vedado, 2004
Size: 31 x 35" Framed: 32 1/4 x 36 1/4 x 2 Ã'¼"
Material: Chromogenic print mounted on aluminum
Signature: Signed verso
Edition 1 of 7, 2 AP
DOUST0275.1

Artist Bio:

Since the late 1980s, Stan Douglas (b. 1960) has created films and photographs-and more recently theater productions and other multidisciplinary projects-that investigate the parameters of their medium. His ongoing inquiry into technology's role in image-making, and how those mediations infiltrate and shape collective memory has resulted in works that are at once specific in their historical and cultural references and broadly accessible. Since the beginning of his career, photography has been a central focus of Douglas's practice, utilized at first as a means of preparing for his films and eventually as a powerful pictorial tool in its own right.

The artist is influenced in particular by media theorist Vilem Flusser's notion of the photographic image as an encoded language that is determined by a specific set of technological, social, cultural, and political circumstances.

The present work belongs to a series of photographs by Douglas documenting post-revolutionary Havana, a place, as Douglas notes, "full of evidence of an unfinished revolution." For the artist, the city's architecture provides ample reminders that Cuba's utopian Modernist (and later communist) ideals did not always turn out as planned. Focusing on neighborhoods not typically featured in tourist books and sightseeing tours, including El Vedado, Cerro, and Miramar, Douglas presents buildings and places that demonstrate the change in the original use of these structures over the course of history.

Another edition of the present work is in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.

Portrait Photo by Daniel Dorsa