Stan Douglas, the multimedia artist behind the massive photo image of the Gastown riots at SFU Woodward's, will represent the country at the next Venice Biennale.

At the massive international art event next year, he will mount a solo show of new work in the Canada Pavilion.

Douglas was selected by a national committee comprised of the Polygon Gallery's Reid Shier, John Zeppetelli of the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, and the National Gallery of Canada's Sasha Suda and Kitty Scott.

In a statement, the jury said, "Douglas is one of the country’s most internationally respected artists, with a practice recognized for its critical imagination, formal ingenuity and deep commitment to social enquiry. In conversation, the jury cited the artist’s continuing re-imagination of the mediums of photography and multi-channel film and video installation, together with his paradigmatic investigations into the relation of local histories with generational social forces. The currency of his practice is especially relevant in the context of the Biennale’s global dialogues.”

Douglas incorporates elements of film, history, and advertising into his film, video, photographic, and installation work. His giant Abbott & Cordova, 7 August 1971 (2008), a restaged depiction of the Gastown riots, illuminates the courtyard of SFU Woodward's. A graduate of Emily Carr University of Art and Design, he also created a fully interactive, virtual-reality installation called Circa 1948--a digital film re-creation of two long-gone Vancouver locales as they appeared just after the Second World War, for SFU Woodward's in 2015.

More recently, his 2019 installation Doppelgänger was included in May You Live in Interesting Times, the exhibition curated by Biennale director Ralph Rugoff for the last Venice Biennale. His compelling six-hour video work Luanda-Kinshasa, from 2013, depicting a fictional recording session in the reconstructed Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York, formed part of the 2017 Canadian Biennial exhibition.

Douglas's work hangs in galleries from our own Vancouver Art Gallery and the National Art Gallery to the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Last September, he won the $100,000 Audain Prize for his work.

The 59th Biennale di Venezia will take place from May to November 2021. Exhibitions in the Canada Pavilion are commissioned by the National Gallery of Canada and produced in partnership with the Canada Council for the Arts. There are no specifics yet on what form Douglas's work might take at the international art happening.