Michelle Bui: Tangles
United Contemporary is proud to present Tangles, the inaugural exhibition at the gallery by Montreal-based artist Michelle Bui. In Bui’s photographic and sculptural practice, discarded matter is given new life. Through her materially rich approach to process and composition, mundane found materials shapeshift and transform into sensorial, mesmeric forms. The resulting photographic images reflect an archive of the everyday, revealing cycles of circulation, excess, decay and renewal in surprising and often beguiling ways.
Without a seeming beginning or end, Bui’s images act as almost the opposite of a “still life”. They seem instead to be in perpetual movement, caught in a current of continuous transformation and flux, existing in a state of fraught and fragile present. She creates the conditions required to capture this state of in-between in her studio, not ‘taking’ an image, but rather building it in real time. Working from a collection of discards - including bits of plastic, organic material, netting, and construction materials, some of which are on the brink of disintegration - she finds connections and visual relationships within the disarray, seeing beyond what the material is, and into what it could be in relation to its counterparts. This compositional combination of taxonomy and mimicry (a piece of plastic may appear as a petal, or a fish, or a leaf) allows her to create moments of interdependence between these disparate materials, forging a fragile ecosystem within each image that acts as a microcosm for our world.
Bui likens her compositional process to the construction of language, approaching it as calligraphy and punctuation: threads as commas, petals as full stops, each unfurling element articulating a sentence and coming to a point of visual coherence. The unifying material foundation of Bui’s works is gelatin, itself a substance suspended between liquid and solid. It is an ideal base through which to explore states of transformation and to seek clarity in the chaotic excess of material. While it is easy to feel daunted by the thoughts of overconsumption that these materials are a product of, through her finely constructed images Bui instead manages to find beauty, offering a more optimistic lens on the detritus of our world; and filtering meaning, pattern, and interconnection from the tangle.
“Tangles” is presented in collaboration with McBride Contemporain, Montréal.