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Bumtown

Artist Stan Douglas (Canadian, born 1960)

Date2015, printed 2016

Mediumdigital chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum

Dimensionsimage: 151.3 × 302.3 cm (59 9/16 × 119 in.)
framed: 159.4 × 310.5 × 6.4 cm (62 3/4 × 122 1/4 × 2 1/2 in.)

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineMuseum purchase through the Ruth and Loring Holmes Dodd Fund, Theodore T. & Mary G. Ellis Fund, and funds by deaccession from the Gift of Miss Annie Sprague Weston

Object number2018.38

Label TextStan Douglas’s Bumtown (2015) is a large-format, photo-based chromogenic print mounted on Dibond aluminum. Saturated in black and grays—a nod to the artist’s interest in film noir—the work is part of a group of photographs informally known as the Night Photographs. Douglas (b. 1960) is perhaps best known for In the strictest sense, Bumtown is an animation frame, not a photograph. The image first appeared in 2014 as part of an immersive iPhone and iPad app called Circa 1948, which Douglas created with the National Film Board of Canada. The app enables users to move through a hyperrealistic digital storyscape of two neighborhoods in post-World War II Vancouver, Canada, that were primarily populated by immigrants and people of color, then leveled after the war. Douglas resurrected these neighborhoods by painstakingly crafting historically accurate 3-D models from vintage photographs, film footage, and maps using the computer animation program Maya. Later that year, Douglas scaled up the 1,000-pixel files used in Circa 1948 and projected them in a theater production he directed called Helen Lawrence. Using the same ultra-high-definition files, Douglas created a series of massive, film noir-inspired, black and white chromogenic prints, including Bumtown. Entirely digitally rendered, the whole project took Douglas and a team of Maya artists two years to complete. As a fabricated artifact, Bumtown has been removed several times from the archival images that inspired it.Provenance(David Zwirner Gallery, New York, NY); 2018, purchased by the Worcester Art Museum.

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