Daniel Faria Gallery is pleased to present Lazy Susan, Douglas Coupland’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Cocktail jiggers, porcupine quills, Playskool building blocks, ceramic sausages, calabash pipes, and a bottle of poison appear in Coupland’s new sculptural works. These pieces merge the absurd and the everyday, the luxurious and the disposable, all while defying categorization. They echo the logic of Cubism filtered through the lens of couture fashion and early twenty-first-century Amazon Prime culture. In many ways, Lazy Susan represents a culmination of Coupland’s well-known, decades-long artifact accumulations—an archaeology of the pre-internet imagination encountering our hyperconnected present.
The exhibition builds on Coupland’s recent unexpected series of iceberg paintings, The New Ice Age, presented at Daniel Faria Gallery in 2023, Arsenal Contemporary in New York in 2024, and the Independent in New York, in 2025. Like those paintings, the new sculptures invoke Cubist geometries, while their glamourized palettes and fractured forms speak to our distinctly 21st-century condition.
Where does beauty fit into all of this? Coupland’s 2023 collaboration with the fashion house Valentino prompted him to think more deeply about luxury culture and the role of adornment in contemporary art. “Fashion is art, but it transpires at a different pace and in different ways. People who dismiss fashion seem incomplete to me,” Coupland says. “And I’m also totally burnt out from seeing art that has to be explained to me before I’m ‘permitted’ to see it. There’s much to be said for simple beauty and the magic of the unexplainable.”
When encountered in person, the sculptures in Lazy Susan are elusive yet seductive—difficult to pin down. They reveal Coupland’s precision with composition, material, and colour, yet each rotation yields a different reading, a new revelation. “The best works, for me,” Coupland writes, “are ones like that dream where you discover new rooms in your house you didn’t know existed. Your world suddenly feels larger.”
The exhibition’s title refers to Coupland’s process: each work was built atop a wooden Lazy Susan purchased from Value Village, rotating continuously so that no vantage point was ignored. “Lazy Susans were so helpful in making this show,” Coupland notes. “But maybe as objects they need rebranding. Who was this Susan person? And what did she do—or not do? Aren’t we all curious?”
Douglas Coupland is a graduate of Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, as well as the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo, Japan. He also attended the Istituto Europeo di Design in Milan, Italy. His work has been the subject of two major museum retrospectives: everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the Royal Ontario Museum, and Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art, and Bit Rot at Rotterdam’s Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Munich’s Villa Stuck. His work has been included in numerous international exhibitions including: Electric Op, Buffalo AKG, 2024; Digital Witness, LACMA, Los Angeles, 2024; Beyond Words, DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague, 2023; Art in the Age of Anxiety, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2020; Hello, Robot., Hyundai Motorstudio Busan, 2022, Nouveau Musée Bienne, 2020, and Vitra Design Museum, 2017; Human Learning:
What Machines Teach Us, Kiasma, Castelnau-le-Lez, 2022 and Canadian Cultural Centre, Paris, 2020; 24/7: A Wake up Call for our Non-Stop World, Somerset House, London, 2019; I Was Raised on the Internet, MCA Chicago, 2018; and Electronic Superhighway, curated by Omar Kholeif, Whitechapel Gallery, London and MAAT, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017. His curatorial practice in collaboration with Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Shumon Basar has produced a trilogy of exhibitions: The Age of Earthquakes, ICA London (2015); The Extreme Present, Fondazione Prada, Milan (2018); and Age of You, MOCA Toronto (2019). Coupland’s work can be found in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery (Vancouver), University of British Columbia (Vancouver), Museum of Canadian History (Gatineau), Glenbow Museum (Calgary), Agnes Etherington Art Centre (Kingston), the Albright Knox (Buffalo), and the Confederation Centre (Charlottetown). He is a member of the Royal Canadian Academy, an Officer of the Order of Canada, an Officer of the Order of British Columbia, a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and recipient of the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence.
