Pigment inkjet printing, 2021
I happened upon a package of pig’s bowels while looking for my dinner at my local supermarket. Wrapped and compressed around a clear blue-green plastic tube, then packaged in the standardized Styrofoamand-plastic-film tray, there was something about it that felt surgical rather than culinary, compelling me to bring it back to the studio.
Bowels retain their own curved shapes, though you can control them a bit by tying knots to block balloons of air in the casings. The bowels made me think of the quality of membranes, how the material is both fragile and resistant, both porous and impermeable. Like flowers, but unlike photographs, their formlessness allows them to swell, wilt, and change with ease.
Michelle Bui’s photographic and sculptural practice reflects the processes of accumulation, presentation, and eventual decay that mark our relationships with seemingly mundane items. Gathering objects of a waste-based consumer culture primarily from the aisles of grocery, hardware, or craft stores, Bui reframes them, parsing their formal or material kinships into temporary, fragile assemblages that sometimes exist just long enough to be photographed before they collapse, disintegrate, or decompose.
Bui received the Prix Pierre-Ayot in 2022. Recent exhibitions include Arsenal (New York), McBride Contemporain (Montréal), Esker Foundation (Calgary), and Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). Her work is included in numerous public collections, including those of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Global Affairs Canada, Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and RBC Art Collection.