Pierre-Ayot and Louis-Comtois Prize | michelle bui and karen elaine spencer winners

On Thursday evening, the City of Montreal and the Association of Contemporary Art Galleries (AGAC) awarded the Pierre-Ayot and Louis-Comtois prizes respectively to Montreal visual artists Michelle Bui and Karen Elaine Spencer.

The Louis-Comtois prize, named after the Quebec painter who died prematurely at the age of 45, aims to consolidate the recognition of a mid-career artist and to highlight the quality of his or her production in Montreal. The prize comes with a $7,500 grant, a $2,500 budget for the organization of an exhibition and the purchase of one of his works by the City.

Before receiving this award, karen elaine spencer told The Press to be “pleased and surprised” to have been among the finalists, along with two other highly renowned artists, Mathieu Beauséjour and Nelson Henricks. She was already a finalist in 2019. This time, it was she who submitted her application, “since I had already been given a kind of pat on the back to encourage me! “, she says.

After receiving her prize, the artist, very moved, read a text in English, poetic, on the paths of art and those of life, a prose which reflected quite well her moods and this energy, this freedom that leads him to create works always marked by a strong and clear commitment to an art that questions and mobilizes.

Originally from British Columbia, karen elaine spencer, now 62 years old, has lived in Montreal since the 80s. Curator and artist committed to performance, action art and a pronounced taste for writing, it is a woman who likes to question the evidence and denounce injustice. The small letters of his name are also to challenge the established order.

In 2007, she had already received a prize, as part of the event Ephemeral landscapesthanks to the installation street of dreams, speakers that broadcast the dreams of citizens. In 2012, she won the Powerhouse prize from the La Centrale gallery. In 2017, she exhibited at the Ellephant gallery an interesting, clever and current corpus, Headlines [Les manchettes]playful and serious works on the future of media.

michelle bui

For its part, the Pierre-Ayot Prize aims to promote the dissemination of visual artists aged 35 and under. Michelle Bui was a finalist alongside Trevor Baird and Lucie Rocher. She wins a $5,000 grant, a budget of $2,500 for the organization of a solo and the acquisition by the City of one of her works.

Born in Montreal, Michelle Bui paid tribute to her hometown “where people have the audacity to put culture and art forward”. And she thanked her family, who were her first gallery, her first collectors, her first amateurs, until exhibiting, 15 years ago, “a fairly realistic watercolor of (her) boyfriend represented in his bath, a work which was 8 feet tall! »

Michelle Bui, who studied at Dawson College, Concordia University, UQAM and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, has always been driven by the need to express herself through art. “As a teenager, I was marked by exhibitions in Montreal,” she says. That of Nan Goldin or even Jean Cocteau at the Museum of Fine Arts. Two very intimate exhibitions that allowed me to glimpse what it could be like to be an artist. »

Her first exhibition was at the Mount Royal Library in 2006. As a student, she revealed her interest in the female body and the status of women. But this is his first solo, Pool of Plenty, at the Galerie de l’UQAM which represents his first relevant deployment. Her approach has become installative, Michelle Bui taking photographs of objects assembled and staged in a sculptural way.

“I work with objects a lot now, but for me it’s always like an extension of the body, of how we interact with objects, of how we accumulate them,” she says. There is something very intimate and very familiar. For example, in my flower forms, I often see the female body, a spine, a certain elegance. »

Elegance but sometimes also chaos in some photos. Michelle Bui has two ways of working, with vertical photos of assembled objects or experiments on the ground with a letting go of form. Recently represented by the McBride Contemporary gallery, she has already exhibited in Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver, where she installed a work of public art last spring. She is currently preparing an exhibition for fall 2023 at McBride Contemporain.