To understand how local artists shape matter to extract their vision of the world, you have to go and meet them. Mise en lumière is a series of portraits that appears at the end of each month. Forays into the world of creators who work on their works in an unusual way, away from cultural news.
Photography, for Michelle Bui, is a gesture of writing. “In my photos, there is first an approach of associating shapes, textures and abstract elements, as if I were constructing sentences. I then undertake a process of editing, not only my own sculptural work, but also the images themselves, so that a form of poetry emerges.”
For several years, she has mainly photographed her sculptures, abstract montages of disparate objects that she mostly freezes in tubs of water or gelatin. These are gleaned from flea markets, markets or trash cans. “I feel overwhelmed by our tendency to accumulate and throw things away,” explains the artist. “I see my work as an archive of the life of objects, frozen in time, as an archive of our excesses.”
Her most recent photographs are her most abstract. It can be difficult to distinguish specific subjects or understand the angle from which she captured the images. This approach has crystallized in her exhibition Porous affinitiespresented last fall at the McBride Contemporain gallery, which represents her.
“For this series, I selected elements that I felt had affinities, either formal or conceptual,” says the photographer. “I wanted to associate them so that they would mix with each other, as if they were reproducing, like living organisms. I recreated processes of mold or mushroom formation. In the works, we can recognize all sorts of elements, including seeds, petals or waste. I combined ultra-manufactured objects, which embody our capitalist system, with natural forms.” Their colors, textures and the softness that emerges from them thus oppose the “violence” inherent in industrial products, she observes.
Body experience
Winner of the Pierre-Ayot Prize in 2022, the artist has accumulated exhibitions exponentially since her master’s degree in visual arts at UQAM in 2018. She has notably been seen solo at Bradley Ertaskiran, formerly the Parisian Laundry, in Montreal (2019), at Franz Kaka in Toronto (2020) and at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Vancouver (2022). This summer, she participated in a group exhibition at the New York gallery Arsenal art contemporain and, in October, she will take part in the La Nuu photo festival in Barcelona. Her works are also included in a dozen major public collections, including that of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Michelle Bui’s images are also increasingly intruding into public spaces. They can currently be seen in the Faubourgs area of Montreal, in an exhibition curated by Eunice Bélidor. “I think my work lends itself well to this,” she says, “because I feed off the interaction between my works and the public, by reflecting on the bodily experience. I seek to subtly evoke the human body, through shapes that can recall the skin or the stomach. Even when I work with petals, for example, I am always exploring the relationship to the body and to transparency.”
During our visit to her house in La Petite-Patrie, which she converted into a studio for the duration of her maternity leave, an imposing print of her photo Dried Orchid, Peach Flesh (Dried Orchid, Peach Flesh, 2023) was hanging on the wall. We don’t know exactly what we see there—plastic, a plant stem, petals—or how it’s made, but the precision of the lighting and the large format of the image bring out a maximum of textures and reveal a singular universe.
From sculptor to colorist
“I’ve always been inspired by the painter Cecily Brown,” says Michelle Bui. “Our practices are really different, but she works a lot with bodies. It’s very visceral. I think I design my sculptures, my assemblages of objects, a bit like her, that is to say alla primaall of a sudden, with the energy of the moment.”
The photographer has perfected this approach in recent years, after having long produced still lifes, often with her own ceramics and flowers on colored backgrounds. “My way of working with photography is close to the approach of a sculptor or a colorist. I started taking photographs to give body to my works, to enlarge them and recontextualize them. I always want to capture moments of transition in the life of objects. In ceramics, I reuse the same clay, I often transform my pieces.”
However, it was her visits, at the age of 16, to museum exhibitions of Nan Goldin and Jean Cocteau in Montreal that she considers to be the first pivotal steps in her career. “I was struck by the large formats, the violence and the relationship to vulnerability of Nan Goldin’s work, which still inspires me in my work.”
And like Jean Cocteau, Michelle Bui claims a profoundly multidisciplinary approach, where poetry, ceramics, sculpture, drawing and photography are interrelated. “I don’t rule out exhibiting my trays of objects frozen in gelatin, for example, or my drawings one day. But I don’t want to force anything. Up until now, my practices have appeared naturally to me, always with the idea of questioning identity and our relationship to consumption through objects. I’m far from having finished with these questions.”