Stan Douglas:
Tales of Empire

For more than four decades, the Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas has built a rigorous, internationally acclaimed practice. Renowned for his intellectual depth, cinematic vision, and sustained engagement with history and literature, Douglas works across the media of photography, film, and installation to examine how power, memory, and ideology are constructed—and how the past continues to reverberate in the present. 

With Stan Douglas: Tales of Empire, the McMichael presents a focused survey of the artist’s work, bringing together key projects that relate to the enduring impositions and contradictions of empire. The exhibition invites viewers to consider how historical narratives are formed, mediated, and reimagined over time. 

Since opening, Tales of Empire has received thoughtful national and international attention. Below are selected highlights from recent press coverage, offering further insight into Douglas’s practice and the ideas shaping the exhibition.

Forbes 

In an interview with Chadd Scott for Forbes, Douglas reflects on his long-standing use of reenactment as a way of grappling with historical and geographical distance: 

“I try to make work to help me understand something, something which is historically or spatially distant. I want to be able to have it in front of me, to see what this is,” Douglas explains. “Often it involves collecting, gathering material as a way of presenting things which were different together in the first place…but occasionally there’s more of a speculative fiction—what might have happened in this place and time.” 

Read the article. 

The Globe and Mail 

In conversation with The Globe and Mail art critic, Kate Taylor, Douglas speaks to his interest in layering meaning and reference—inviting viewers to experience both recognition and disruption: 

“I find it fascinating, a sort of biological possibility, taking historical artifacts that someone may recognize and then doing something else with that on top of it,” he says. “So maybe the audience can only understand the new thing they’re witnessing, or they may have an understanding of the previous reference I’m making, and that will give them a new perspective.” 

Read the article. 

CBC Radio 

Douglas also joined Ismaila Alfa on CBC Radio’s Fresh Air for an in-depth conversation about the themes of Tales of Empire and his approach to interrogating history through image-making: 

“When I look at a place, I always wonder how it came to be the way it is,” Douglas says. “Especially when you find a place with some kind of antinomy, where things are contradictory—how did those contradictions come to pass and why is it tolerated?” 

Listen to the full interview.