Fall 2019
For our 2019 Fall Education Program, Plug In ICA is offering a tour of Luanda-Kinshasa by internationally acclaimed artist Stan Douglas. Douglas’s 6-hour video installation is set in a reconstruction of the legendary Columbia 30th Street Studio, which was based in Manhattan and home to some of the most renowned musical recordings of the twentieth century such as Miles Davis’s On the Corner. The studio was also popular with artists working across all genres such as the iconic Billie Holiday, the renowned jazz musician Thelonious Monk, and the great Aretha Franklin. Luanda-Kinshasa takes place in the 1970s, and is a documentation of a fictional recording in the famed studio featuring a band of professional musicians improvising together playing jazz-funk, electro jazz, and Afrobeat mix. Students will be encouraged to think about historical legacies and influences of specific sounds and musical compositions, as well as the context in which they are borne that create complex relationships between the productions of images and sound, and their impact on our imaginings.
The tour will introduce students to Plug In ICA’s history and then discuss the individual exhibition. The tour can vary in length to suit your schedules but is designed to last approximately 1 hour.
Stan Douglas 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. 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. An alumnus of Emily Carr College of Art in Vancouver in the early 1980s, Douglas was one of the first artists to be represented by David Zwirner, where he had his first American solo exhibition in 1993. In 2013, a major survey of the artist’s work, Stan Douglas: Photographs 2008–2013, was presented at Carré d’Art – Musée d’Art Contemporain in Nîmes, France. Other major solo presentations include those held at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon (2015); The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2014); Minneapolis Institute of Arts (2012); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2005); Serpentine Gallery, London (2002); Centre Georges Pompidou (1994); and Art Gallery of Ontario, (1987). Recently, Douglas participated in La Biennale di Venezia, 58th International Art Exhibition. Douglas has been the recipient of notable awards, including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography (2016); the third annual Scotiabank Photography Award (2013); and the Infinity Award from the International Center of Photography, New York (2012). He lives and works in Vancouver.
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