Michelle Bui

Michelle Bui’s photographic and sculptural practice reflect the processes of accumulation, presentation, and eventual decay that mark our relationships to seemingly mundane items. Sensual and sensorial, her images point to the negotiation between our understanding of ourselves and the objects that we amass. Gathered primarily from the aisles of grocery, hardware, or craft stores, Bui reframes these objects of a discard-based consumer culture. She parses their formal or material kinships and assembles them into temporary, fragile assemblages that sometimes exist just long enough to be photographed before they collapse, disintegrate, or even decompose. She has had solo exhibitions at the Esker Foundation, Calgary, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, McBride Contemporain, Montreal, Franz Kaka, Toronto, Parisian Laundry, Montreal, and Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal and was the recipient of the 2022 the Prix Pierre-Ayot award.

 

In this recent series, the compositions made of various fragments and debris become slipping glimpses that record a world of material excess. Formal, material, and symbolic affinities have been considered, examined, and assembled into short-lived compositions that undergo changes in phases and state. Existing just long enough to be photographed, the resulting images will, I hope, encourage a conversation between incongruous forms- ricocheting or bouncing from one to another and form a sort of archive that weave in our senses and point towards the cycles of decay and rebirth.