Encounters between Matthieu Brouillard and Donigan Cumming explores the common currents running through the work of these artists, and more specifically how similar impulses are translated formally, emotionally and conceptually through the medium of photography. Through proximity, the usual readings of each artist's work are inevitably modified and multiplied; each work is imbued with a new light. While highlighting a community of interests and an affinity of sensibility between two artists of different generations, the book is also an opportunity to present unusual and sometimes radical views within the debates that have shaped contemporary photography.
As Brouillard and Cumming wrote: "In linking our work, we wanted to play with these points of connection with differently charged electrical potentials in order to generate high intensity energies as well as short circuits. Moments of connections as well as brilliant ruptures. This project could then function as a curious "machine" that produces as much as it dissipates; infuses as much as it diffuses; conditions as much as it deconditions. A machine that is all the more efficient because it does not pursue homogeneity and conformity, transparency and clarification. A machine that produces excesses, improbable associations and polyvocal bodies that disempower the thought at the same time that they activate and animate it."
Returning to the photographic projects Cumming conceived in the early 1980s and relating them to the photographs Brouillard has made since 2003, this publication reveals over thirty years of artistic production and is accompanied by critical essays by Eduardo Ralickas and Erin Silver.
