Photo Credit: Stewart MacLean
Contact
dougdumaisart [at] gmail.com
Biography
Doug Dumais is a camera-based artist working in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. A self-taught artist, Dumais holds a master’s degree in art history from Concordia University (2019). He has exhibited at The Guild, the City Hall Art Gallery in Ottawa, this town is small, ARTCH Montréal, and Galerie La Castiglione.
Statement
Doug Dumais uses the camera as a tool to facilitate radical acts of noticing and attentiveness. He documents locations undergoing drastic changes such as construction sites, eroding shorelines, or public institutions.
In the studio, Dumais digitally manipulates his images by juxtaposing them with historical paintings, layering them with poetry, or transforming them into impossible spaces. This lyrical editing process draws out hidden narratives within his images and transforms them into material conduits for abstract concepts such as time, meaning-making, or the influence of one’s surroundings on the formation of identity.
This approach materializes the invisible connections between places and their inhabitants, artworks and their viewers, or texts and their readers. Dumais’ manipulated photographs of the ambient spaces humans occupy, traverse, or overlook are footholds in the process of becoming deeply aware of the overlapping histories and subjectivities present within the built and natural environment.