Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories was co-published by the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver and the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska on the occasion of the artist’s solo exhibition, which traveled to the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto and The Studio Museum in Harlem. The exhibition focused on Inconsolable Memories, a recent body of work compromised of a screenplay, an experimental film, and related photographs. Douglas based his installation project on a 1968 Cuban film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, which portrays a bourgeois intellectual struggling in the social climate of Cuba in the early sixties, after the Bay of Pigs invasion and missile crisis. Douglas’s film fast-forwards the same character to the 1980 Mariel Boatlift, when Fidel Castro allowed a temporary lift of emigration restrictions and some 125,000 Cubans left for the United States. In Inconsolable Memories, Douglas manipulates Alea’s original film by retaining the characters but introducing a divergent historical setting. This exhibition catalogue contains an illustrated screenplay and forty color plates of related photographs that were taken by the artist on research trips to Havana. Also included are essays by art critic and historian Sven Lütticken and Director and Curator at the Art Gallery of York University, Philip Monk.
