Internationally renowned Vancouver-based artist Stan Douglas has shown his work at and had it collected by prestigious institutions around the world. His photographs and projections are celebrated not only for their conceptual acuity and formal precision but also for how they continually extend the possibilities of film and video, and art itself.

Klatsassin defies the official version of events leading to the Chilcotin War of 1864 by focussing on the story of a Tsilhqot’in chief who was accused of murder, tried and executed. Set in B.C.’s Cariboo-Chilcotin region, it depicts events related to gold rush efforts to build a road through Tsilhqot’in territory to the gold fields and the First Nations insurgency in response. Current events in the region echo those of the earlier conflict between aboriginal and colonialist interests. Klatsassin is composed of three elements: a filmic projection, a series of photographic portraits of characters from the film, and a series of landscape or location photographs.

Klatsassin’s form and content recall Akira Kurosawa’s classic film Rashomon (1950), and its similar multiple and contradictory portrayals of a murder. In Douglas’ work, too, various versions of a murder scene are depicted. Within both Rashomon and Klatsassin changes in perspective and narrative revisions turn a single incident into a complex and multi-layered story that raises probing questions. Is there such a thing as a singular absolute truth? Who determines which version of a story becomes the official version and who decides what ‘history’ tells us? While posing such questions, Klatsassin draws our attention to the constructed and fragmentary nature of history, identity and place.

The exhibition opening is preceded by a lecture by Stan Douglas.

Supported by The Audain Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Hamber Foundation and The Leon and Thea Koerner Foundation

Sponsored by CBC Radio One and London Drugs