Stan Douglas, the young Canadian artist whose recent photo
works were on view at the Guggenheim Museum downtown,
showed two of his early installation pieces in this entertaining
and enlightening exhibition at David Zwirner. Film, slide and
video projections seem to be all the rage lately (in a single
afternoon SoHo gallery jaunt, I visited no less than five galleries
in a two-block radius that offered such work); Douglas seems
to have timed this exhibition perfectly to show New Yorkers
how it's done. In the most powerful piece, titled Onomatopoeia,
a series of black-and-white slides of old textile machinery are
projected in a darkened room onto a screen above a player
piano in the throes of a mechanized Beethoven sonata. This
powerful work demonstrates why Douglas, with his eloquent
and poetic approach to projection art, blows most other
practitioners off the stage.
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