1:1 Artists Select: Stan Douglas | Lawren Harris

The impulse to make connections between objects is a nearly universal experience. Artists are always in dialogue with their predecessors and peers, and they often make astute curators.

1:1 Artists Select is a new initiative that invites artists to select a work from the Vancouver Art Gallery’s extensive collection to be displayed in dialogue with their own work in the Forecourt.

The first to participate will be acclaimed Vancouver–based artist Stan Douglas. He has selected a work from the collection by Lawren Harris, a founding member of the Group of Seven.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 in Vancouver, BC, and attended Emily Carr College of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design). He is known internationally for his films and photographs—and, more recently, theatre productions—that explore the parameters of lens-based media. Douglas has exhibited in museums across the globe and represented Canada at the Venice Biennale in 2022. The Vancouver Art Gallery organized solo exhibitions of his art in 1999 and 2009, and his work first entered the Gallery’s collection in 1990.

Lawren S. Harris (1885–1970) was one the founding members of the Group of Seven and a significant figure in the development of modern art in Canada. Along with other members the Group, Harris helped establish an identity for Canadian art—and the nation more broadly—primarily through mythologizing the landscape as vast and uninhabited as part of the burgeoning colonial project. Despite having produced a significant body of abstract paintings over the course of his career, he remains best known for his early, stylized landscapes.