Michelle Bui

As a child, I was repulsed if two separate foods made contact on my plate. If a piece of food even grazed the bottom of the kitchen sink, it went to the dog. I wasn’t a picky eater, but the cross-contamination of foodstuffs was insufferable. This aversion, if we want to get pathological, is called brumotactillophobia and is deemed a mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Thankfully, this fear subsided when I learned to cook. But this longing for comestible purity resurfaced when I was confronted by the photographs in Montreal-based artist Michelle Bui’s exhibition, Naked Excess, on view until June 26 at the Esker Foundation in Calgary.

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Michelle Bui, “Des pommes et des raisins,” 2018, “Happy Like Doris Day,” 2018, “Loop,” 2019, “Baby’s Breath,” 2019, “Made in China,” 2018 (left to right)

pigmented inkjet print on paper (courtesy of the artist and the Esker Foundation, Calgary)

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Michelle Bui, “Made in China,” 2018, pigmented inkjet print on paper (courtesy of the artist)

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Michelle Bui, “Happy Like Doris Day,” 2018, pigmented inkjet print on paper (courtesy of the artist)

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I say “confronted” unreservedly. The exhibition’s first five images stand 99 inches tall, swelling their subjects to anthropomorphic proportions. In Made in China, we’re talking offal the size of squished beach balls. In Happy Like Doris Day, the animal intestines could handle a child. The logic of this series works by marrying, in synchronic embrace, the appetizing with the abject, the organic with the artificial.

The photographic vocabulary – portrait orientation, acute staging and opaque saturation –borrows knowingly from the language of commercial “packshot” photography, situating Bui in the respected company of Ontario-based artists Shellie Zhang and Jimmy Limit. Appropriating the visual tropes of advertising is often used as part of a critical methodology – for instance, the Situationist technique of détournement, the “rerouting” of popular media, or later-20th century forms of subvertising, adbusting and culture jamming. 

Bui, in a conversation with curator Elizabeth Diggon, says Naked Excess is not a direct critique of consumerism or advertising. I agree for two reasons: first, many depicted objects, primarily sourced from craft and food markets near Bui’s home, appear to be a salmonella outbreak away from the garbage bin. Second, Bui’s aptitude for creating an advertising aesthetic gives the photographs licence to market themselves as seductive art commodities. This isn’t to imply the lure of Naked Excess lies on the surface, but that Bui has dodged the obvious eco-art route of advertising subversion by opting for something more nuanced and complex.  

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Michelle Bui, “Shapes That Form From Below,” 2019, pigmented inkjet print on paper  (courtesy of artist and Franz Kaka, Toronto)

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Michelle Bui, “Loop,” 2019, pigmented inkjet print on paper (courtesy of the artist)

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Bui worked predominantly with sculpture prior to her MFA thesis show, Pool of Plenty, at Montreal’s Galerie de l’UQAM in 2018, and her continued spatial sensibility is evident throughout Naked Excess. Exhibiting photographs exclusively is significant. Bui has established her own decisive moment – a temporal urgency between the market counter and the heat of studio lights. There’s no evidence of flies, mould or putrefaction, but things are starting to look smelly. Photography’s unique capacity to timestamp objects serves to distance works like Shapes that Form From Below away from the No Frills™ commerciality of Loop, while pushing them toward the quiet drama of the still life with its memento mori gravitas. The meat will not last long. And in the grand scheme, nor will the plastic tie, wooden frame or even the wall. You get the point.

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Michelle Bui, “Still Life Under Rolling Pin,” 2019, pigmented inkjet print on paper (courtesy of the artist)

Bui describes her expansive use of quotidian objects as a process of democratization, an indexical portrait of globalized culture. In the compost cornucopia Still Life Under Rolling Pin, it’s difficult to decipher what is organic and what is plastic. The bagged condensation in Sweat can either be read as the off-gassing of organic decomposition or, more broadly, the universal process of entropy and energy conversion explained in the Second Law of Thermodynamics – roughly speaking, hot things cool unless you do something to stop it. A democratizing thought, indeed. As you move through the show, from the packshot-inspired photographs at the entrance through to the newly commissioned billboard-sized murals, Naked Excess, the works tend to move in the direction of transformation and disorder. 

In my childhood, the sense of order I demanded was for food to remain as it appeared in grocery store flyers and restaurant menus, preserved photographically free from contamination and decay. I wanted food detached from its material history of extraction, cultivation, labour and slaughter, as well as its masticated future beyond my esophagus. In Naked Excess, Bui reminds us that all commodities on market shelves, from latex gloves to chicken hearts, have both a dynamic history and a future, material realities too often superseded by the time-resistant stasis of photographs. ■

Michelle Bui: Naked Excess, at the Esker Foundation in Calgary from Jan. 22 to June 26, 2022.

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