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8/3/2002

Douglas Gordon

Vancouver Art Gallery, Vancouver

VANCOUVER, B.C. Douglas Gordon, widely recognized as one of the most important artists of his generation, is best known for his video installations, which take as their subjects classic Hollywood films such as Psycho and The Searchers. Opening March 9, 2002 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Douglas Gordon is the first major survey of the Scottish artist's work in Canada.

Curated by Russell Ferguson, formerly Associate Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and currently UCLA Hammer Museum deputy director of exhibitions and programs and chief curator, Douglas Gordon examines the artist's exploration of themes including trust, guilt, confession, deception and doubling, which weave their way throughout his diverse career. Many of his works are strongly related to cinema and he has utilized material ranging from cult films to amateur videos and medical documentaries. Seemingly familiar images are often disrupted by the use of extreme slow motion and by unexpected reversals and doublings. Gordon consistently uses found imagery to explore issues of memory and individual identity. Taking advantage of the fictional aspect of the visual media, he examines the "duality" of human nature. Many of Gordon's works are based on dichotomies - passion and angst, hate and love, seduction and violence, life and death, perception and memory.

"Douglas Gordon is one of the most important artists working today," said Grant Arnold, Vancouver Art Gallery Curator. "His compelling use of cinema and photography to examine the intersection of memory, imagination and the external world finds common ground with interests that inform a great deal of art making in Vancouver."

Douglas Gordon is best known for film installations that feature classic films by directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese and Otto Preminger. In Through a Looking Glass (1999), for instance, Gordon projects the famous scene from Scorsese's Taxi Driver (in which Robert De Niro's character, Travis Bickle, repeats the words "You talkin' to me?" to his mirrored reflection, and draws a gun) onto two facing walls of a darkened room. Gordon amplifies the scene's disturbing effect by pitting the two Travises against each other, with the viewer caught in the crossfire.

The dark undercurrents found in the film projections recur in photographic works such as Tattoo (for Reflection) (1997), a photograph of a man's back tattooed with the word "Guilty." The word is inscribed backwards on his left shoulder but is legible in the reflection of an adjacent mirror. Trust is the subject of works such as Tattoo (I) and Tattoo (II) (both 1994), photographs in which the phrase "Trust Me" is shown tattooed on the artist's arm. One is not sure if the words are those of a close confidant or the utterance of a con man.

Comprised of video, text and photographic works, Douglas Gordon is the most comprehensive exhibition of the artist's work to date and provides a thorough introduction to Gordon's practice.

Douglas Gordon has been organized and circulated by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. This exhibition is made possible in part by generous support from Susan Bay-Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy, Catharine and Jeffrey Soros, The Thornton S. Glide, Jr. and Katrina D. Glide Foundation, The Peter Norton Family Foundation, the MOCA Contemporaries, and the New Media Project.

Additional support for the exhibition catalogue has been provided by Art for Arts Sake.

Image: Douglas Gordon, Self-portrait as Kurt Cobain, as Andy Warhol, as Myra Hindley, as Marilyn Monroe (detail), 1996

Vancouver Art Gallery 750 Hornby Street Vancouver, British Columbia Canada V6Z 2H7
Hours: Wednesday to Sunday & Holidays 10:00 am - 5:30 pm Thursdays 10:00 am - 9:00 pm Closed Monday and Tuesday

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