At age 38, Vancouver artist Stan Douglas is currently the most successful young artist in Canada. His multimedia installations have appeared at major institutions around the world, and he is considered one of the top artists of the contemporary era. Never heard of him? That’s probably because his art is not easy to distill. It is academically inclined – rich in lost histories and layered with so many structural and narrative interplays that reading about his work is necessary to understanding it.

Douglas’s individual pieces are stunning. For the famed Hors-champs, for instance, the artist suspended a film screen in a darkened gallery and projected film footage of free-jazz musicians on one side and outtakes from that film on the other. There is no one vantage point, and no singular narrative, so part of the viewer’s experience of Hors-champs is walking back and forth from one side of the screen to the other.

This kind of experience is difficult to sandwich within the pages of a book, so the Vancouver Art Gallery has wisely stayed away from merely documenting an exhibition of Douglas’s most recent work, currently showing in Vancouver. Indeed, many of the most elegant images in Stan Douglas are the artist’s photographs from the mid-1990s of Vancouver landscapes and private gardens in Germany – works that could best be described as surveyor documents that capture a serendipitous beauty. Curator Daina Augaitis’ essay fills in the context behind the photographs and describes the artist’s fascination with geography as it is shaped by history.

The book is not laid out chronologically. In fact, its non-linear structure, which subtly links the text to the images and the exhibition itself, is very much in keeping with the artist’s style of playing with fragments. Some will find it too esoteric, others will dip into the poetry of it all, recognizing that flexible interpretation is at the core of Douglas’s work.