Too Many Things

Too Many Things visits the world of objects — their accumulation and dispersal — and their creation of cummunities of curiosity.  The title is somewhat ironic.  My work has always fed on things as the symbolic and incidental expressions of human presence.  For a photographer, or a filmmaker, there can never be too many things; the camera likes to ferret them out and hang onto them, just as some people do.  "Piled-up structures of inference and implication," as Clifford Geertz described ethnography's places of study, have also been my sites of activity as an artist.  In this case, the piling up is quite literal.  The main setting of the work is the Salvation Army Thrift Store, which visibly represents a superabundance of objects in continuous migration — across boundaries and social divisions — until their use-value is exhausted and they are recycled for parts and material.  The community represented in Too Many Things is a group of highly individual men who meet daily at the Thrift Store to pursue their fascinations with gadgets and computer technology, and simply to be together in a mode of spontaneous, yet structured sociability.

— Donigan Cumming

"...there is such an overabundance of creativity and celebration that the excitement leaks out of the frame."

— David Davidson, Toronto Film Review, March 2010