An un-containing of things—a fluttering, a dispersal, a profusion

Fred Douglas

Curated by Nellie Lamb

June 9 to July 8, 2023

“My stories and pictures emerge out of arrays or lists. They are a condition of compilations. I add one thing to the other until a kind of catastrophe occurs. The catastrophe is a picture or story. Of course, stories and pictures can be invented, for once a model exists variations can be contrived from it. But this is not the process I refer to. What I’m interested in is the condition that existed before the picture and story emerged and how this emergence occurs.” – A Menu for Sunset, Fred Douglas 

My memories of my dad, Fred Douglas, are of a man deeply engaged with the ongoing flow of life. He was an autodidact and polymath with a sharp wit. He was interested in utopias and the design of clothes, cars and everyday things like menus. He was excited to think and learn. He was incredibly genuine, often contrarian, sometimes messy and could be loyal to a fault. There was little boundary between Fred’s art, teaching and life. 

Since his death in 2005, the bulk of Fred’s work and effects have been inaccessible or maybe lost. The work of preserving a legacy, which requires dwelling on both the past and future, was perhaps not suited to him. The art and other items in this mini-retrospective come from the personal collections of Fred’s friends, family, students and colleagues. Some of the work is in draft form or otherwise incomplete or imperfect but I find that out of it, particularly when I arrange these objects in groups, a sense of my dad emerges: not an absolute uncontested image of the artist but a fleeting thing that coalesces only to dissolve and nonetheless feels exactly like him.

Nellie Lamb is a curator, writer, and elementary school teacher living on the land of the Lək̓ʷəŋən-speaking peoples and the Songhees, Esquimalt and W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations (Victoria, BC). Her work as a teacher, writer and curator often deals with notions of place. 

As a teenager, Fred Douglas was a self-described “hooligan” who spent his time racing stock cars in Vancouver’s East Side. Through the 1950s and 60s, he worked as a sign painter, commercial photographer, and exhibition designer. During this time, he explored abstract painting and performed poetry at the Cellar Jazz Club. In 1972, he co-founded the Leonard Frank Memorial Society of Documentary Photographers, a street photography group concerned with the “unglamorous depiction of everyday life.” Those who remember Fred from this time tell stories about him and his friend Curt Lang—particularly their creativity and proclivity for mischief. Between painting and writing poetry, they worked as night-time janitors at the Vancouver Art Gallery. While on the clock the duo wrote the “janitor’s report”—reviews of exhibitions left for staff to find the following morning. In return, they would receive notes begging them to clean. 

From 1980 to 2000, Fred taught photography and drawing at the University of Victoria. He believed art education should “allow students to flower in relation to their own sensibility.” His former students have spoken of his ability to nurture their understanding of their own imaginative capabilities through engagement with current critical theory. 

In his later artistic career, he was concerned with combining “pictures and stories,” which created an imaginative space in which “the act of constructing meanings becomes an active part of the subject.” Bodies of work from this time include Redeemed Plates (a series of photographs of decorative brass plates found in thrift stores and yard sales that interested Fred for their banal, dead imagery that he sought to enliven through a process of photographing the plates and painting the photographs), Crossfade (a series of painting and photograph diptychs that are poetic little worlds rendered in the style of mid-century commercial art) and The Van (a 1963 Morris van outfitted as a camper van for the purpose of photographing but reluctantly exhibited as an installation/performance piece). After retiring from teaching, he focused on the production of Flutter, a now-lost “magazine” about Vancouver, which brought together hand-tinted photographs, photograms, drawings, paintings, digitally produced images and writing including a narrative sourced from a practice of lucid dreaming. Fred died in 2005, aged 69 before completing Flutter. 

This project is supported by an Explore and Create – Concept to Realization grant from the Canada Council for the Arts.

Mockup of publication: