Stan Douglas
«Le Détroit»

In this synchronised two-track 16mm black-and-white film installation, Stan Douglas once again highlights the aesthetic and narrative elements of film while continuously looping the negative print of the story set in Detroit («Le Détroit» is the former French name of the city). Douglas reinterprets the conventions of popular media, invoking the horror movie, exploring the impact of popular culture and technology on social imagination. The installation is an adaptation of Shirley Jackson's 1959 novel, «The Haunting of Hill House,» and Marie Hamlin's 1883 chronicle, «Legends of Le Détroit.»

«The film installation, «Le Détroit», by Canadian artist Stan Douglas tells a short story about a woman who breaks into a deserted house, whose former inhabitants have left behind a most remarkable collection of domestic articles and junk. His story, however, turns out to be a compulsive act, its constant repetitions submerged as if imaging a world composed purely of shadows in murky halftone layers.»
Frank Wagner

«Herman Gardens’s where the film was made, comes to stand then as the symbolic unconscious of Detroit‘s trauma, while Eleanoree’s presence and her search restore the black social order that disappeared with the city’s urban decline.»
Okwui Enwezor