Donigan Cumming is a multimedia artist who uses photography, video, drawing, sound, and text in experimental documentary films, collages, installations, and books. Since 1983, Cumming's work has contributed to Canadian and international festivals and exhibitions dealing with themes of the body, truth/fiction, taboos of representation, and social engagement.
Cumming's major solo exhibitions, beginning with photography and sound installations, include Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography, The Mirror, the Hammer and the Stage, Diverting the Image, Pretty Ribbons, Harry’s Diary, Les Pleureurs, La Répétition, Barber’s Music, Moving Stills, and Gimlet Eye. In 2005, Moving Pictures, curated by Peggy Gale at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, presented a survey of Cumming's work in a variety of media, including video, photography, and mixed-media and featuring the large-scale encaustic collage Prologue and Epilogue, which went on to be featured in Donigan Cumming: La somme, le sommeil, le cauchemar, curated by Catherine Bédard for Le Mois de la Photo à Paris. A residence undertaken at Centre VU resulted in Kincora, a large suite of drawings printed in inkjet and exhibited at VU and La Galerie Éric Devlin in 2008. A survey of Cumming's work in multimedia, photography, and video was presented in the 2008 exhibition Ex Votos at Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery. Cumming's video works have screened in Canada and internationally since he took up video in 1995. In 1998, the International Film Festival Rotterdam featured Cumming's work in the programThe Cruel Machine. In 2000, his video installation Moving Stills was featured in the IFFR's Exploding Cinema, while his work Fountain premiered at the IFFR in 2005. Cumming's videos have screened at the New York Video Festival, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Anthology Film Archives, and the Museum of Modern Art, and have also shown regularly at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma. Two retrospectives of his video work were organized in 2002, at the Pacific Film Archive and at Visions du Réel, Nyon International Film Festival. The Cinémathèque québécoise, in collaboration with Vidéographe, presented a retrospective of Donigan Cumming's works in 2014. In 2015, Cumming's video Culture was included in the program L'œil du photographe : la photographie et le documentaire poétique / A Photographer's Eye: Photography and the Poetic Documentary at the Festival 2015 Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal. Two anthologies published in 2015 included entries on Cumming's photographic work: Une Collection. Maison européenne de la photographie ; and The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Photography, ed. Nathalie Herschdorfer. His artist book, Kerr's Suitcase marked a return to photographic themes of loss and recovery.
Characters and themes
Cumming's first video, A Prayer for Nettie, was an elegiac work produced following the death of Cumming's long-time subject and collaborator, Nettie Harris, who also featured centrally in Pretty Ribbons. A Prayer for Nettie also marks Cumming's transition from photography to video, and features several of the individuals who had figured in Cumming's photographic work, including Albert RossSmith, Raymond Beaudoin, Joyce Donnison, Nelson Coombs, Gerald Harvey, and Geoffrey Bates. An additional cast of characters is introduced in Cumming's 1996 video, Cut the Parrot, a video produced for the deceased Albert and introducing Beatrice Johnson, Elizabeth Barclay, Susan Thomson, James Carter, and Gordon Alexander. In the 1997 After Brenda, Cumming introduces Colin Kane and Pierre Lamarche, who figure centrally in subsequent video works Erratic Angel and Petit Jésus, respectively. Four Storeys focuses on Colleen Faber who, with Kane, is a lead character in the 2000 work if only I. Martin Corbin, who makes a short appearance in if only I, is the main focus of My Dinner With Weegee. Harvey returns in Voice Off, accompanied by Gordon Verge, who was featured in the short video Wrap. Cumming's subjects regularly make cameo appearances in the form of photographs and voice-overs in many of Cumming's other videos, reflecting what Marcy Goldberg has written about Cumming's work: "…it wouldn’t be a classic Cumming work if it weren’t also a commentary on the activity of capturing other people in still and moving images. The multiple meanings of the film’s title—anthropological, aesthetic and scientific-biological—hint at the multifaceted nature of the impulse to document other people’s lives." Cumming's video works from 2005 to 2009, which include Fountain, 3, Monument, and Pencils, Ashes, Matches & Dust take on more abstract and conceptual forms, his 2010 Too Many Things marking a return to his long-time community of human subjects. In the tragi-comedy Exit Interview, this shrinking community's resident documentary filmmaker is being fired. Out of Kerr's Suitcase reunites Cumming with two characters who first appeared in his photographic cycle Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography as they reminisce about lives lived before the camera. In 2018, the Rendez-vous du cinéma Québecois premiered Cumming's The Seven Wonders of the World in its Art and Experimentation program.
