Donigan Cumming

Diverting the Image

Nicole Gingras, Disquieting Poses

The voice is the body's memory. To recite stories from memory — the excerpt from the Cecil B. de Mille film that is repeated in The Stage, for example — shows the power that words hold over the memory of a man who remembers. The same apparatus is at work in Reality and Motive in Documentary Photography, Part 3: the male and female voices falter several times, revealing the implied theatre and the tragedy of illusion.

Patrick Roegiers, A Descent into The Hell of Donigan Cumming

As actors portraying their own lives in grotesque or pitiful situations, they are graced with undeniable presence. They make up a vast den of thieves who, by exhibiting stumps and scars, pre sent the remarkable strangeness of the never seen.

 

Les Cents jours d'art contemporain, Montréal, Québec, Canada - 1993
Art Gallery of Windsor, Windsor, Ontario, Canada - 1993