Behind the Experiments
"Nobody knows you when you're down and out."-Jimmie Cox
Except maybe Donigan Cumming. Traveling the hallways of grim residence hotels where the luckless, the infirm, and the borderline mad dwell, Cumming fashions fascinating videoworks about the abject heroics of everyday life. Where many of us might turn away, Cumming fixes his gaze, but not the gauzy gaze of a voyeur-rather he is cohort, collaborator, and provocateur, provoking his "subjects" to confess their desires and failures, to dramatize their hard-won dignity. Confounding the borders of documentary and drama, Cumming draws his subjects into a circle of complicity where they "play" themselves as only they can. This is no simple formula: Cumming typically creates a circumstance-a crisis to enact, a conceit to pursue-that can go awry as easily as it can coalesce. Adding further turbulence, he makes his own presence known through off-screen comment, shadows cast, the jocular cameo. In the midst of this unstable "reality," questions arise, as poignant as the peeling paint: Are the videotapes just more exploitation of these sad denizens? Or do they offer a moment of respite from the terrors of disintegration? In Donigan Cumming's theater of the down-and-out, the ethical dilemma fits perfectly over the human condition.
Based in Montreal, Donigan Cumming was trained as a photographer. He has exhibited two significant photographic series, Pretty Ribbons and Harry's Diary, internationally. His videowork began in 1996.
Introduction and notes written by Steve Seid, Video Curator.
