Michigan Central Station is part of a larger photographic series, Detroit Photos , which includes images of houses, theaters, stadiums, offices, and other municipal structures. Continuing his fascination with failed modernist utopias, Douglas depicts Michigan Central Station as a monolithic, almost prison-like structure lording over a desolate landscape. Once the hub of industrial transportation, the station is now devoid of any human activity and lies fallow, surrounded by train-less tracks and vegetation-less ground. Douglas’s preoccupation with obsolete sites like this seems less concerned with revisiting or memorializing them than in reviewing the conditions of their failure.
Stan Douglas makes videos and photographs that draw on the legacy of modernism to explore the cultural, social, and political history of the twentieth century. This is evident in his reference to large-scale housing works and other public projects. It also surfaces, perhaps more unexpectedly, in his connections to that period’s cultural production, like the great “auteur” filmmakers and authors, whose grand and utopic artistic projects now seem impoverished.
Forest Gathering N.2 is part of the series of photographs Beneath the Roses (2003-2005) where anonymous townscapes, forest clearings and broad, desolate streets are revealed as sites of mystery and wonder; similarly, ostensibly banal interiors become the staging grounds for strange human scenarios...
Some Dead Don’t Make a Sound (Hay muertos que no hacen ruido) is a single-channel video by Claudia Joskowicz that features the Mexican legend of the Weeping Woman (La Llorona) as its main protagonist...
In Un Hombre que Camina (A Man Walking) (2011-2014), the sense of rhythm and timing is overpowered by the colossal sense of timelessness of this peculiar place...
Modotti’s Diego Rivera Mural: Billionaires Club; Ministry of Education, Mexico D...
Untitled (Women) (2011) presents a startlingly succinct history of violently romanticized femininity...
Ben Shaffer’s Ben Deroy (2007) is part performance, part self-portrait, and part spiritual vision...
Visalia Livestock Market, Visalia, California results from Lockhart’s prolonged investigation of an agricultural center and community...
Lockhart’s film Lunch Break investigates the present state of American labor through a close look at the everyday life of the workers at the Bath Iron Works shipyard—a private sector of the U...
The primary interest in the trilogy is Joskowicz’s use of cinematic space, with long tracking shots that portray resistance to habitual viewing experiences of film and television...
In the series Horizons (2010), Lipps uses appropriation to riff on Modernism’s fascination with abstract form...
Tree on the Former Site of Camera Obscura (1996) belongs to a series of large-scale photographs of trees taken by Graham and depicts a particular species that lives in Northern California...
Created for the tenth Lyon Bienniale, in Days of Our Lives: Playing for Dying Mother, Wong’s ongoing negotiation of postcolonial globalization takes aim at French society...
Untitled (Breathless) presents a folded newspaper article on Jean-Luc Godard’s À Bout de Souffle (Breathless)...
Herculine’s Prophecy by Juliana Huxtable features a kneeling demon-figure on what appears to be a screen-print, placed on a wooden table, which has then been photographed and digitally altered to appear like a book cover, with a title and subtitle across the top, and a poem written across the bottom...
Empire’s Borders II – Passage and Empire’s Borders II – Workers are from the three-channel film installation Empire’s Borders II – Western Enterprise, Inc...