M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:08:10.

Collection: Courtesy of te Artist and Victoria Miro.

Douglas’ Monodramas are a set of ten short 30- to 60-second video fragments that were originally conceived as unannounced interventions amongst the advertisements on commercial television in British Columbia, Canada, appearing nightly over a period of three weeks. These video fragments emulate the style, editing and tropes of television drama with their tales of suburban tension, dysfunction and misunderstanding. We see in one monodrama a pedestrian on a suburban street greets an oncoming person with “Hey Gary. How ya doing?”, to which he receives the response “I’m not Gary”. In another, a school bus and a car nearly collide at an intersection, then eventually just drive off. Yet, Douglas introduces some unsettling features that provide some insights into how television media homogenises images of society, culture and coexistence. This special version of Monodramas includes the period advertising from the early 1990s into which the video fragments were originally inserted. The clandestine nature of their status as artworks at the time of the original broadcasts, confused viewers who called the station to ask what exactly was being sold, elucidating the condition of viewing during commercial breaks towards a more consumptive gaze.