Entertainment: Selections from Midcentury Studio is an exhibition of new photographic work by Vancouver artist Stan Douglas. Stan Douglas: Entertainment is a 72-page critical reader that accompanies and addresses the exhibition; it is the first in a new series called Power Plant Pages. The reader includes reproductions of the works in the exhibition, as well as new texts by Professor of History and Theory of Photography and New Media at the University of Toronto, Louis Kaplan and Berlin-based art historian Maria Muhle, along with a curatorial introduction by Melanie O’Brian.

The work in the exhibition continues the artist’s practice of reexamining historical, site-specific layers, particularly the imaging of postwar North American diversions from cabaret to sports. The body of work is largely a meticulous studio project in which Douglas assumes the lens of a photographer who takes on various jobs from Weegee-esque photojournalism to advertising. Achieving verisimilitude, Douglas reconstructed a studio using authentic equipment as well as hired actors to produce staged photographs that emulate the period’s obsession with noir-ish drama, magic, dance, sporting events, curious artifacts, fashion, and “caught-in-the-moment” scenes, gambling, and, of course, shifting technologies.

The exhibition includes the Malabar People, a series of sixteen black-and-white portraits of the patrons and staff of a fictional 1950s nightclub. The patrons range from single women to loggers, and the staff encompass bartenders, waitresses and entertainers (a dancer, a female impersonator, a musician). Accompanying them are additional photographs from Midcentury Studio that provide a further context for period entertainment including a multiple exposure image of a dancer, photographs of stage magic tricks or sleight of hand, and large-scale images of hockey and cricket events. The works were shot in Vancouver, and although the locations are not always revealed, the city not only plays itself but stands in for a midcentury every city. The notion of entertainment is entwined with a postwar optimism, while at the same time inflected with darker ramifications of looking back. The photographs in Entertainment collectively speak to notions of history and reproduction, and offer a partial portrait of a specific place and time.

Stan Douglas: Entertainment features an arresting silk-screened cover with French flaps and elegant duotone interior designed by Sameer Farooq of New Ink.

Melanie O'Brian is currently Director of Simon Fraser University Galleries in Vancouver and Burnaby. She was formerly Curator at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Director/Curator at Artspeak in Vancouver, and Assistant Curator at the Vancouver Art Gallery. She has organized exhibitions locally and internationally, edited numerous publications, and written for numerous journals, catalogues, and magazines.

Melanie O'Brian's profile page

Louis Kaplan is professor of Visual Studies and Art History and an affiliated faculty member at the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Photography and Humour; The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit Photographer; American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century; and László Moholy- Nagy: Biographical Writings.

Louis Kaplan's profile page

Maria Muhle's profile page