Stan Douglas’s first US survey in more than two decades is now on view at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Douglas is renowned for his multidisciplinary restaging of pivotal moments in history. The exhibition, titled “Stan Douglas: Ghostlight,” features more than forty works from the 1990s to the present, including an immersive new video installation in which the artist reconfigures D. W. Griffith’s racist 1915 propaganda epic The Birth of a Nation. Across five screens, Douglas projects segments from the original film alongside altered versions that imagine the same scene from multiple perspectives, exploring perception, prejudice, and culpability. To mark the occasion, Artforum revisits “Daily Double: The Art of Stan Douglas,” a feature essay by Daniel Birnbaum published in the magazine’s January 2000 issue, which featured a still from Douglas’s 1998 video installation Win, Place or Show on its cover.
 
“Douglas’s historical explorations are always concrete in their scrutiny of technological changes, and he always seems to be in search of situations in which a particular development could have veered off in an alternate direction, where layers of significance are present but not yet activated,” writes Birnbaum. “The inquiries into constellations of technology, ideology, and art are never pursued in the interest of achieving some overwhelming, all-encompassing final synthesis. On the contrary, most of Douglas’s work displays a tragic fracture, a tension that may appear superable in rare hopeful moments but can never be fully redeemed.” In summation: “There’s much more here than meets the eye.”
—The editors

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan