ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, New York — AI-generated images, videos, and audio recordings made with the intent to deceive are now a fact of online content consumption. And they are particularly prevalent in the arena of politics. Lying in order to gain or hold power is nothing new, but the contemporary proliferation of deep fakes makes the ability to read an image more important than ever. Stan Douglas: Ghostlight, now on view at Bard College’s Hessel Museum of Art, is a master class on the subject, as well as an engrossing exploration of historical moments of political change and possibility.
The exhibition, curated by Lauren Cornell, is the first survey of Stan Douglas’s work in decades. Featuring photos, videos, and films, Ghostlight is a comprehensive overview of 40 years of art-making. It offers a clear demonstration of Douglas’s deft and meticulous hand, even as his work often focuses on the potential in improvisation. Viewers first encounter the wall-spanning photo that gives the show its name, depicting the darkened interior of the Los Angeles Theatre, an ornate 1930s movie palace. The title references the longstanding tradition in theaters of leaving a bare light on at centerstage — a gesture with origins in both safety and superstition. Opening with this photograph evokes the specter of a century of rapt audiences, mesmerized by the manufactured histories flickering before them, the hero ever-shifting based on who is telling the tale and how.
Stan Douglas, “Powell Street Grounds, 28 January 1912” (2008)
There’s so much to spend time with in Ghostlight that it’s impossible to capture it all here. But all of Douglas’s work centers on reconstructing historical moments or conjuring those that might have been, always with a Brechtian touch. Intentional awkwardness or sly references alert viewers that these are indeed artistic creations and not the “real” thing. For instance, in his Midcentury Studio series, Douglas intentionally replicates the style of photographers like Weegee, who was infamous for staging or manipulating his sensationalistic images. In his epic 2011 ≠ 1848 series, Douglas creates static simulations of upheavals that took place in 2011, such as the uprisings in Tunisia, Occupy Wall Street protesters blocking the Brooklyn Bridge, and the riot that followed that year’s Stanley Cup game in Vancouver. Through composites of elaborate staged scenes and highly detailed images of place, the artist foregrounds questions about what we can and can’t see when we receive news of these events on television or as we scroll — pushing us to think about the individuals in these scenes rather than a faceless crowd, and asking how the story might have unfolded differently.
The retrospective’s key work is its most recent, “Birth of a Nation” (2025), a five-channel video drawing from a 13-minute excerpt from D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film of the same name. The original film, adapted from Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan, is a racist caricature of the South from the Civil War into Reconstruction. It became hugely popular as white supremacist propaganda for some audiences, while others vehemently condemned it. The film was denied release in Ohio as well as a number of US cities. What fewer people might know is how enduring the movie has been, and not just among those upholding Lost Cause narratives. As an undergraduate in the late 1990s, I was assigned the entire three-hour screed for a film history class and the work is still taught today. The typical reason is the innovative camera and editing techniques. Yet, Griffith made over 500 films, hundreds of which employ those same techniques and contain far less racist content. Douglas aptly approaches Griffith’s Birth as a still-standing Confederate monument, this one carved in celluloid.
Stan Douglas, “Tunis, 23 January 2011” (2021)
Douglas’s work focuses on a sequence known as “the Gus chase,” in which a White actor in blackface playing the character Gus asks to marry Flora, a White woman who has gone alone to retrieve water from a spring. In Griffith’s depiction, after Gus’s request is refused, he attempts to force himself onto Flora. The sequence ends with members of the KKK, including Flora’s brother Ben, lynching Gus. In the script published in the show’s catalog, Douglas describes Gus this way: “the hallucination Ben and Flora see when they encounter Sam or Tom.” Sam and Tom are characters Douglas invents, imagining what a Black man of the time might actually have been doing in the woods that day. In his multi-channel remix, Douglas surrounds the original footage with four alternate views: one from Flora’s perspective; one from her brother’s perspective; one from Tom, who is out hunting waterfowl; and the last from Sam, who does indeed propose to Flora, having met her earlier in his life. In the Sam version, the character walks away from the scene alive.
A content warning is posted outside of the screening room so viewers can choose whether to watch it or not. You can see the entire exhibit and get a rich sense of Douglas’s art without it. But in interrogating Griffith’s work as a monument, he points to what’s at the heart of all those bronze statues and stone figures: the story itself; the false bogeyman; the scapegoat still being chased down the streets of this country. In some ways his intervention, though in an elaborate package, is quite simple — suggesting that Gus was a real man, going about his day, who could have kept his life. But in a time when the US government is releasing heavily edited video, cheap cinematic soundtrack included, depicting the Department of Homeland Security’s nighttime assault on the almost entirely Black and Brown residents of a Chicago apartment complex, the echo from the past feels all too loud. The narrative is everything: the crafting of the image, what the frame does and doesn’t reveal, and, perhaps most poignantly, the always-present potential for history to take another course.
Stan Douglas, “Birth of a Nation” (2025)
Stan Douglas, “Vancouver, 15 June 2011” (2021)
Stan Douglas, “Hors-Champs” (1992)
Stan Douglas, “Nu•tka•” (1996)
Stan Douglas: Ghostlight continues at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (33 Garden Road, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York) through November 30. The exhibition was curated by Lauren Cornell.
