EXHIBITION // STAN DOUGLAS // DAVID ZWIRNER GALLERY // NEW YORK

© Stan Douglas - David Zwirner Gallery

Stan Douglas : The Enemy of All Mankind - 12 Sept. to 26 Oct. 2024

David Zwirner Gallery
525 West 19th Street
New York

www.davidzwirner.com

The Enemy of All Mankind: Nine Scenes from John Gay’s Polly presents a new series of photographs by Stan Douglas. On view at the gallery’s 525 West 19th Street location, this is the artist’s eighteenth exhibition at the gallery.

In this stand-alone group of nine images, Douglas stages scenes from the comic opera Polly, written in 1729 by the English dramatist John Gay, using the narrative as a vehicle through which to engage a wide range of themes that remain highly relevant today, including race, class, gender, and media.

Gay’s play centers on Polly Peachum, who sails to the West Indies in search of her estranged husband, Captain Macheath, who has disguised himself as a Black pirate named Morano. There, Polly is unknowingly sold to a wealthy plantation owner as a courtesan. She escapes, disguising herself as a young man to avoid male attention, and finds herself in a series of conflicts among colonial settlers, pirates, and the local native population.

“Stan Douglas utilizes forms of popular entertainment ... to destabilize narratives that depict society as a unified, homogeneous front with one history, one set of desires, and one value system.... [He] disrupts representational systems by introducing unsettling elements of difference. Issues of race and class infiltrate his entire project.”

—Nancy Spector, curator, critic, and art historian

Douglas was intrigued by the play’s radically early depiction of transgender and transracial drag, as well as its satirical critique of England’s colonial presence. In opposition to their barbaric representations in popular culture, the pirates in Polly constitute a kind of protodemocratic “maroon” society at sea, its members enjoying liberal freedoms and political acceptance not afforded to them on the mainland.....