Stan Douglas Plays a Trick on the Eye That’s a Real Treat

Stan Douglas turns history into poetry. His films and projected videos set the common languages of movies and television against themselves. A viewer doesn’t suspend disbelief in order to follow the film and video stories Douglas’ work tells. Instead we’re shown the ways in which pictures create belief, especially through the media that create mass culture.

A small exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art features three exceptional projected works by the 40-year-old, Vancouver, Canada-based Douglas, together with 33 photographs that function somewhat like studies or sketches for them. (Several research documents are also on view.) Dating from 1995, 1996 and 1998, the three projections demonstrate an artist whose work becomes progressively richer and more complex, without overreaching.

Given that it starts with “The Sandman,” a mesmerizing two-track film that must be some kind of landmark in the genre, that’s no mean feat. “The Sandman,” like Douglas’ other work, concerns the slipperiness of memory, the illusory quality of images and the false monolith that history inevitably becomes.

Shot in 16-millimeter film and featuring a voice-over narrative, a pair of side-by-side projected pictures turn a 360-degree circle inside a sound stage. At the start, the two adjacent images form a single, seamless picture. As the circular tracking continues, however, one scene gets ahead of the other. It’s as if the movie screen had split apart.

As one side passes from backstage through the set of a rural scene where an old man is shown doing chores--a sight that seems to recall parts of the story already told on the voice-over--the other slides across electrical cables, props and painted flats. Short-term memory is questioned, as you attempt to recall whether the image on the left side is the same as what was just shown on the right; or, whether it shows a slightly different point of view or action in the story.

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The circumnavigation of the sound stage continues, until finally the two images catch up with each other again. We’re back where we started. A “true” picture is restored, at least in the sense of cinematic convention. But a rupture has also opened wide.

Projected as a continuous loop, the film continues, repeatedly reopening the divide and disjunction among sights and sounds. Your eyes, ears, mind and memory struggle to assemble bits and pieces into a four-dimensional mosaic.

Nearby, “Nu*tka*” performs another type of splitting. A single-channel video projection, it’s accompanied by two voice-over narratives that sound like readings from letters or a diary--one by an Englishman, one by a Spaniard. The image pans across a serene lake and wooded forest before a majestic mountain range, periodically focusing in on details.

The horizontal scan lines of the projected video image suddenly split apart, with the even lines showing the camera moving over a landscape in one direction, and the odd lines recording another part of the landscape and moving in an opposite direction. (Visually, it’s a bit like the ghost image that occurs when you drag an icon across a computer screen.) Every now and then the opposing, layered images come together and snap into place, creating a gorgeous unified picture. When they do, the conflicting voice-overs also come together, their opposing stories of a dispute over land united into a simultaneous observation. Beautiful and harmonious, it also feels false.

The third projection, “Win, Place or Show,” compounds things even more. Two video channels are projected onto two screens, which meet at the center but are slightly angled to form a wide V. Each side shows half of a single scene in the story, but since the halves were shot from slightly different angles, the place where they meet doesn’t always fit together. People talking to each other appear to be talking past each other. (Know the feeling?)

This meeting place turns out to be a kind of visual black hole smack in the middle of the narrative. Occasionally, each protagonist momentarily disappears into it, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

The short story unfolds on a proverbial dark and stormy night. It concerns two men residing in a sleek, spare, Modernist-style apartment. Their conversation turns to placing bets on a horse race. Suddenly, a fight breaks out between the men. Tempers finally cool, and one tells a nervous joke. Then, the loop begins again.

When chance--gambling on a horse race--enters the scene, the dream of utopian order embodied by their Modernist environment devolves into violence. Douglas pumps up the story’s structural randomness, too, through the use of a computer program that shuffles scenes into more than 200,000 possible combinations. When the six-minute loop begins again, the story and point of view slightly change.

What you remember from before might this time be photographed from a different side. The closing joke might change. What was heard off screen might this time be seen on screen.

You begin to question your own memory of what you’ve just seen--and your experience of what you’re seeing now. And I can describe the narrative I saw--or what I remember of it--but it will be different from the one you see. Paradoxically, active questioning and doubt on the part of the viewer serve to make the story more lifelike, not less.

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Photographic transparency, or the illusion that a photograph records a truthful picture of the world, has been dismantled by numerous artists over the last few decades. Douglas is among the few who have been extending that project into the infinitely more complicated territory of film and video--and doing so with skill, insight and ingenuity.

Douglas is a fixture in Europe, but his work has been seen in L.A. on just a few occasions--a group of 60-second stories, meant to be shown like commercials on TV, which appeared at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions in 1994; and, a savvy remake of a scene from Hitchcock’s “Marnie,” included in a 1997 group show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Although the MOCA show has one less projection than was included at the Vancouver Art Gallery, where the exhibition was organized last year, the three works that made the cut are superlative. Don’t miss them.

* “Stan Douglas,” Museum of Contemporary Art, 250 S. Grand Ave., L.A., (213) 626-6222, through April 1. Closed Mondays.