Philip Monk Livres

Is Toronto Burning? looks at both the beautiful and ugly sides of the underground art scene in Toronto during the late 1970s, brimming with rebellious art from an often overlooked period.

Stan Douglas, born in Vancouver in 1960, is among a younger generation of artists that has come of age artistically around figures like Jeff Wall and Rodney Graham. His thorough photographic series and elaborate film and video installations, all technically meticulous, are the base for subtle societal criticisms and investigations of authorship and subjectivity. They are media machines, Automats of a sort, which involve the viewer in their mechanics; they reflect an era of transition from literally mechanical reproduction to electronic saturation. Douglas's widely appreciated work has appeared in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and three Venice Biennales; at Documenta 9, 10 and 11; at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao; and at the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Dia Foundation for the Arts in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others.