Michelle Bui: Naked Excess

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Michelle Bui, "Still Life Under Rolling Pin," 2019

pigmented ink jet print on paper. Equitable Bank Art Collection

Michelle Bui: Naked Excess

Michelle Bui’s photographs 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. In the same breath, they cause us to question our appetite for these objects, this excess, in the first place.

Her materials are gathered primarily from the aisles of grocery, hardware, or craft stores; venues where a seemingly endless array of objects co-exist, ready to be purchased, consumed, and discarded en masse, ordered only by what the artist calls “the detached pragmatism of consumerism.” Once these objects find a place in Bui’s studio, 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. Viewed through the lens of a camera, and subsequently printed at an enormous scale, Bui’s material subjects are divorced from their original purpose or context and distilled down to their intimate, sensory qualities.

Online Artist Talk with Michelle Bui

February 17th, 2022 This is an online event, registration is essential.

Join us for an artist talk and conversation with artist Michelle Bui, facilitated by Curator Elizabeth Diggon as they discuss Bui’s artistic practice and her Esker Foundation exhibition, Naked Excess.

Michelle Bui is a Montreal-based artist working in photography and sculpture. Her work revolves around the inseparable conjuncture between material culture and identity, opening it to a shifted place where sensory identity can unfold. Recent solo exhibitions include Spilled Plenitude, Franz Kaka, Toronto (2020); Centerfold, Parisian Laundry, Montreal (2019); Plein Soleil, Circa, Montreal (2019); Pool of Plenty, Galerie de l’UQAM, Montreal (2018). Selected group shows include Maison de la culture Claude-Léveillée, Montreal; Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University, Newark; Projet Pangée, Montreal; Vu Photo, Quebec City; Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran, Montreal, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Montreal. Bui completed her MA at Université du Québec à Montréal and at Beaux-arts de Paris, and her BFA at Concordia University.

February 24th, 2022 at 6-7pm In-person: Curatorial Tour with Elizabeth Diggon

Join Curator Elizabeth Diggon for a tour of Esker Foundation’s current exhibitions, Farah Al Qasimi: Letters for Occasions, Michelle Bui: Naked Excess, and Veronika Pausova: Fast Moving Sun.

Registration essential. Opens 11 February, 11am.

In-person with limited capacity.