Stan Douglas “DCTs and Scenes from the Blackout”

David Zwirner 19th Street

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David Zwirner presents an exhibition of recent and new photographs by Stan Douglas—the artist’s fourteenth solo exhibition with the gallery. On view will be works from a recent series, DCT (begun 2016), and a new and never-before-seen series, Blackout (2017), that together illustrate the artist’s overarching interest in the nature of photographic representation and its relationship to reality.

The abstract compositions that comprise Douglas’s DCT series are, in essence, synthetic pictures that look at photography as an optical image in the broadest sense. To create these works, Douglas manipulates a sequence of data points referred to as a “DCT” (discrete cosine transform), which specify how JPEG images are compressed. For his new series Blackout, Douglas scripted and staged scenes from a hypothetical present-day emergency scenario of the total loss of power in New York City. A rare series set in contemporary times, and Douglas’s second work to be shot in New York, these imagined vignettes are meticulously planned, seamlessly interweaving fact and fiction in their evocation of past events that have affected the city.