Author Archives: cchan40

Catherine

Mushroom Forage – Oct 5, 2022
Artist’s Conk spores… making more artists!


Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

Robin Wall Kimmerer is a mother, scientist, prof, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

Drawing of Sweet Grass (Image credit: pngwing.com)

Learning the Grammar of Animacy

In Potawatomi 101, rocks are animate, as are mountains and water and fire and places. Beings that are imbued with spirit, our sacred medicines, our songs, drums, and even stories, are all animate.

Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Kimmerer explains what drew her to botany—it was the desire to learn the language she heard in the woods
  • In learning Botany, this was different than the language of the woods
  • In science, language is of seeing, naming objects, categorizing them—she describes it as being constrained by our knowing
  • In contrast to scientific language, she describes Potawatomi, and many Indigenous languages, where there are very few fluent speakers because of government schools, residential schools where it was forbidden and punishable to speak one’s language
  • Kimmerer describes the loss and her desire to learn and reconnect with Potawatami
  • Much of the words are verbs – Examples of verbs include to be a bay, to be a hill, to be a Saturday.
  • Doesn’t assign masculine/feminine forms, way of speaking of living world is different from inanimate world
  • Animate beings aren’t referred to as ‘it’, an object

Language reminds us, in every sentence, of our kinship with all the animate world.

Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Language mirrors the animacy of the world
  • Embedded within language is a reminder of our kinship with all the animate world
  • Language itself is a tool for respecting animacy
  • Words and language are the heart of culture, holding thoughts and a way of seeing the world

Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass

It is not the land which is broken, but our relationship to the land.

Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • In this chapter, Kimmerer shares the teachings of grass through a study she and her grad student Laurie took on about sweetgrass
  • They were asked by basket weavers whether different ways of harvesting might cause the leaving of sweetgrass, noticing some areas had healthy, replenishing amounts of sweetgrass and others didn’t
  • The chapter is written in subsections that mirror technical writing: intro, literature review, hypothesis, methods, results, discussion, conclusions, acknowledgements and references cited
  • Tight format of scientific thinking
  • Problematic exclusion of knowledge outside of scientific canon, western scientific canon is only truth in this type of institution
  • There’s pushback against the study in the form of a dismissive thesis committee who criticize that there isn’t valid scientific theory to support such a study and claims the answer to the proposed research is already known
  • They do the study anyhow where they compared plots of sweetgrass where half was picked in accordance to the traditional way of harvesting, that you only pick half.
  • by pulling up the roots and half was picked by pinching just above the surface of the soil
  • Compared this to control plots where no sweetgrass was picked
  • Results show that picking sweetgrass stimulated growth, didn’t matter how it was picked,
  • Reciprocal relationship between humans and sweetgrass developed over long long time of cultural use, where disturbances were needed for sweetgrass to thrive

THE HONOURABLE HARVEST

  1. Never take the first one (And that means you’ll never take the last)
  2. Ask permission
  3. Listen for the answer
  4. Take only what you need
  5. Minimize harm and benefit the plant
  6. Use everything you take
  7. Be grateful
  8. Share what you’ve taken
  9. Reciprocate the gift

Sustainable harvesting can be a way to treat a plant with respect, by respectfully receiving its gifts.

Sustain the ones who sustain us and the earth will last forever.

Robin Wall Kimmerer
  • Reciprocity – more expansive idea than just sustainability, which is still focused on ownership over what we call resources
  • Reciprocity – earth not only sustains us but we have capacity and responsibility to sustain her in return
  • Mutual flourishing rather than just continuing to take
  • We humans have gifts that we can give in return for all that is given to us – there’s a generative and creative way to be a human in the world, of knowing your gift and how to give it, on behalf of the land and of the people.

Some Terms

AnimacyPotawatamiPuhpoweeMishkosScientific Method
State of being alive and animate

Grammatical and semantic feature existing in some languages, expressing how sentient or alive the referent of a noun is
pow·tuh·waa·tuh·mee

Algonquian language spoken in Southern Ontario in Canada, and in Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin and Kansas in the USA

In 2012 there were nine elderly speakers
Force that causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight
Rising, emergence, growth
No such term in Western science, represents an understanding of a world of being, unseen energies that animate everything
Potawatomi word for ‘grass’

Sweetgrass = wiingaashk  = Hierochloe odorata
Process of establishing facts through testing and experimentation

Reflections

  • Colonial and misogynistic fingerprints on science – personally experienced/witnessed
  • Human-centric worldview vs more-than-human
  • Influence of language on how we understand and perceive the world
  • Relationship with our materials and lived experience of materials –> parallels of rocks and photography; stills that are compressions of time
  • How does this affect art practice? Some of my materials (rocks) are taken from the land. Does this do more harm to disturb the ecosystem? Thinking about the Honourable Harvest from the Teachings of Grass and importance + practice of asking for permission AND listening for the answer.
  • Came across this beautiful animate rock when I was collecting in the Algonquin Highlands, looking for stones that already had stress fractures in them, and when I saw this one “piecing” itself back together with moss and lichen, I wanted to collect it! A few times repeatedly, I reached out then stopped myself, wanting to have this ‘object’ that encapsulates so much of what I’m thinking about and working through in my practice and also fighting the compulsion to have/own/collect it! Felt wrong to remove the rock and better to leave her be, seeing this rock + moss + lichen in the act of putting herself back together in a new way. Asking for permission, hearing “no”. So I did a photo instead.
Canadian Shield, near Derrick and Rachel’s Cottage (not collected).

“We are in a time of new suns” by Adrienne Maree Brown

Adrienne Maree Brown is described as “a student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A “scholar of belonging.” A “scholar of magic.”” and I love that one’s identity can encapsulate the dynamism of being, knowing, learning.

What caught my attention in this podcast (I read the transcript first, then listened to her voice) was her thoughts on spirituality, the spiritual background of her childhood being a more direct and action-based, practice-based spirituality that transitioned from evangelical Christianity. Her parents were an interracial marriage in the 70s making a world unto themselves that didn’t exist, brought their family out into nature, in parks, in the mountains to look at the world.

Gratitude and compassion were the spiritual practices that threaded throughout. Being amazed by the world, to travel, be curious. Encountering intense racism, there was compassion for the struggle of the other person. The recognition of this short time we have to imagine/create how to make more possible, transform beyond the constructs and toward community, liberation and justice.

Teachers are in the natural world. Her discussion of mushrooms as understanding that nothing needs to be wasted–that everything can be used if we understand what that is. Nature teaches that when something needs nourishing or when it’s done and complete, it needs to be processed back into the whole.

Illustration by Robert Ingpen, from “Lifetimes: The Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children”

The idea of vitality having endings in it resonates. I think a lot about impermanence, both in my practice as well as in living (though these aren’t really separate). When my older daughter was two years old, I wanted to learn how to talk with kids about death. At that age, it’s abstract, but many kids are intuitive and understand/experience loss even when they can’t describe what they’re feeling. My readings into how to talk about death in age-appropriate ways were instigated not by the death of close family members or friends at that time, but by the deaths and loss portrayed in Disney movies we were starting to watch together.

  • · Frozen – Anna and Elsa’s parents die in a shipwreck as they search for answers to the origins of Elsa’s magic

· Lion King – Mufasa dies at the hands of his brother while Simba watches and believes it to be his fault

·  Bambi – Bambie’s mother is shot by a hunter

· Every tug-at-your-heart Pixar/Disney movie such as Up, Toy Story 2 (“When She Loved Me”), Finding Nemo/Dory, Wall-E, Inside Out (Bing Bong), Big Hero 6…the studio knows what they’re doing!

Many parents I spoke with brushed death under the table or denied it when trying to explain to their kids what happened in these movies. The desire to protect others from pain is understandable.

In the podcast, Adrienne Maree Brown continues on, that the beautiful miracle of life happens because we live in cycles, not in perpetuity. Holding onto things when it’s time to let it die puts us in a precarious position.

This is actually one of our biggest issues right now is we’re so scared of death. And so we think about how do we make people live forever, and how do we look young forever, and do all this stuff instead of being like, Oh, no. How do I get good at dying? How do I get to where I’ll be at peace when my time comes, because there’s other generations that need to survive off of the resources of this place?

Adrienne Maree Brown

There are some good books to read with kids about death. The idea of learning about life cycles from the natural world (which we are a part of) often brings me to a passage from the book “Lifetimes: The Beautiful Way to Explain Death to Children” by Bryan Mellonie and Robert Eingpen.

There is a beginning

and an ending for everything

that is alive.

In between is living.

Bryan Mellonie and Robert Eingpen

This phrase is repeated throughout the text of the book, alongside illustrations of plants and animals (including people). Beautiful reminders that dying is a part of living just as being born is. Books on grief that are written for children are apt for adults too, given how much we tend to turn/run away from death and loss.

Letting go is a practice, one I’m reminding myself to do and am exploring in my grad project with the repair of stones. I think my artistic practice is becoming one of learning to let go, which is hard to do for someone who desires certainty and is a self-described perfectionist.

To learn to let go, I was taught by a friend and spiritual teacher to open up my palms, facing upward to the sky. We receive joy but don’t grasp onto it, letting it go out into the world. We do this similarly for grief and hardship, to open our palms upward. It sits there but it can also go out into the world. It reminds me of the idea of reciprocity that Robin Wall Kimmerer shares. Mutual receiving of gifts with the world, which in my mind includes joy and sorrow, and the mutual letting go of it too.

The practice of letting go encompasses more than death and loss. It also provides an active way to counter our compulsion to “own” the natural world and her “resources”. We receive with joy and gratitude, and let go with compassion and gratitude to be, as Adrienne Maree Brown puts it, “put back into the whole”.

The artwork of Motoi Yamamoto calls this practice into mind. Yamamoto is an artist born in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture in 1966. He graduated from Kanazawa College of Art in 1995 and currently live in Kanazawa, Ishikawa Prefecture. A primary part of his practice is salt drawings. For this, he creates large installations of patterns on the floor drawn in salt, taking several days to several weeks to draw them.

Motoi Yamamoto creating a salt installation. Image source: www.motoi-works.com

“Labrynth” by Motoi Yamamoto. Kunst Station St. Peter, Cologne / Solo Exhibition ; SALZ / 2010. Photo by Stefan Worring. Image source: www.motoi-works.com

His choice of salt stems from its use in funerary customs in Japan. Salt represents purification and cleansing. Salt is also needed by the human body to survive. Yamamoto lost his sister in her 20s to brain cancer in 1994 and his wife of over 25 years passed away in 2016 from breast cancer. Yamamoto writes, “I keep creating so that I will not forget memories of my family.”

Motoi Yamamoto creating salt drawings. Image source: www.motoi-works.com

For his “Return to the Sea” project, on the final day of these exhibitions, the artist works together with viewers for whom the work resonates to destroy the work, collect the salt and return the salt to the sea, “to the natural cycle once more” (Yamamoto). Since 2006, thousands of people have participated in this project helping return salt to seas around the world.

“Return to the Sea” project by Motoi Yamamoto. Image source: www.motoi-works.com

“Return to the Sea” project by Motoi Yamamoto. Image source: www.motoi-works.com

“Return to the Sea” project by Motoi Yamamoto. Image source: www.motoi-works.com


“How Should Art Recon with Climate Change?” by Zoe Lescaze

“Great art […] connects us to what might yet be possible.”

Attributed to Rainer O. Neugebauer

Science suggesting anthropogenic climate change has been around for decades before climate change was getting mainstream traction

I learned of and studied climate change beginning in 1996 when I started my undergrad in the sciences

There’s been a big lag in acknowledging, believing, addressing climate change

Bill McKibben noted the indifference from culture sectors for climate change in relation to other crises such as AIDS

Notes that outpouring of art has had political effect on addressing AIDS

There’s more support now for environmentally conscious art; I think this may be related to climate change and its impacts making it more into mainstream media and consciousness, and cultural production is reflecting that

As with other forms of climate action, there’s challenge that some exhibitions and artworks are addressing climate change because it’s trendy to do so, akin to greenwashing

Some artworks seen as agitprop: without naming names, author referenced an Olafur Eliasson work as agitprop that I actually find quite powerful! Ice Watch is the installation referred to in the article by Lescaze, where pieces of ice cast off the Greenland Ice Sheet were collected and shipped to Copenhagen to mark the publication of the 5th IPCC Assessment Report.

A project by Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing marking the UN IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report on Climate Change. City Hall Square, Copenhagen. October 26–29, 2014 .

Listening to the sounds of ice. Image source: https://olafureliasson.net/icewatchcopenhagen

Harvesting ice floating in Nuup Kangerlua, Greenland. Image source: https://olafureliasson.net/icewatchcopenhagen

This type of work is compared with quieter works that don’t necessarily intend to be commentary on climate change, but end of being so, eg. Roni Horn’s Vatnasafn/Library of Water, which I found subtle, quiet and beautiful.

“Vatnasafn / Library of Water” by Roni Horn. Image source: https://www.west.is/en/service/library-of-water

The cylindrical forms are evocative of ice cores, collected for reconstructing past climate conditions:

The dark band in this ice core from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide (WAIS Divide) is a layer of volcanic ash that settled on the ice sheet approximately 21,000 years ago. Credit: Heidi Roop, NSF” Image source: https://icecores.org/about-ice-cores

Although environmental destruction has occurred since at least the Industrial Revolution, article notes that explicitly environmental art depicting degradation didn’t really happen until around 1960s

Prior to that, painters depicted the landscape as “timeless, immutable and impervious to human influence.”

Thomas Cole helped popularize the natural world as an idealized and sublime landscape

Romantic landscape paintings = The Picturesque = nature unspoiled by human intervention

“In the Mountains” by Albert Bierstadt, 1867.

It makes me wonder if this idyllic thinking and image-making contributed to the delay in climate action

Visual depictions can instigate action, a tenet understood by photojournalists for eg, photographing humanitarian crises in order to bring attention to these and give them a voice

Tenet that people take action for that which they care about, some photographers who are dedicated to depicting nature to show its beauty and degradation, hence helping people care

Example is SeaLegacy whose “mission is to create healthy and abundant oceans, for us and for the planet.” The organization was co-founded in 2014 by Cristina Mittermeier, who is a pioneer of the modern conservation photography movement, and Paul Nicklen, the renowned National Geographic polar photographer.

What lies beneath the surface of the thin blue line?

This is the story that SeaLegacy tells. This is the story that sparks a global conversation, and the story that inspires people to act. We believe that producing powerful media and art that gives people hope is imperative. Hope is empowerment. Hope is a solution. Hope is a game changer.

SeaLegacy

“Suspended Grace” by Paul Nicklen (sperm whales sleeping). Image source: https://twitter.com/sea_legacy/status/1365043175287627776

Their approach is interesting because it recognizes the impact of visual storytelling in rallying support and instigating action.

SeaLegacy works with our council of experts to identify projects that together are building healthy and abundant oceans. We invest in community-centered solutions and rally global support for projects through our massive media footprint.

SeaLegacy

SeaLegacy 2018 Impact Report (pages 10-11). Source: https://www.sealegacy.org/our-work

Example of Mary Mattingly’s “Limnal Lacrimosa” achieves something I aspire to—art that connects, fosters dialogue and creates understanding amongst people with varying perspectives, worldviews, experiences.

I loved learning about John Cage’s organ work “Organ2/ASLSP” that started in 2001 and will end in 2640

There’s so much faith and hope in humanity that people will keep the work going and that we’ll not have destroyed ourselves by then!


“Chromophobia” by David Batchelor

“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue colour, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity.” (David Batchelor)

Purging of colour has long history in Western culture and intellectual thought

Colour has been object of extreme prejudice in Western culture

Chromophobia is loathing of colour and fear of corruption through colour

Accomplished two ways:

  1. Colour is associated with some ‘foreign’ body such as, the feminine, oriental, primitive, infantile, vulgar, queer, or pathological—regarded as alien and hence dangerous
  2. Colour is consigned to only being superficial, supplementary, inessential, or cosmetic—a secondary quality of experience therefore not worthy of serious consideration

Since Antiquity, colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded.

David Batchelor

Batchelor brings up that the virtuous whiteness of the West conceals the terrors of the flesh and the corruption of the Western ideal of the classical body–one that is “pure, polished, unembellished, untouched and untouchable white.”

It made me think about the insidious ways that this virtuousness “erased” bodies with darker skin tones through the racial bias of photography.

In the history of photography and film, getting the right image meant getting the one which conformed to prevalent ideas of humanity. This included ideas of whiteness, of what colour — what range of hue — white people wanted white people to be. 

Richard Dyer

Colour film in the 1940s and 50s was developed for light skin tones–this was the dominant consumer market at the time.

So when film companies were defining what an idealized skin tone would be, it was that of a lighter skin tone.

Shirley Card: For decades, photo labs used an image of a white woman to calibrate colours for printing. Accuracy of colours in photos was largely based on this skin-tone. The ‘Shirley Card’ was named after its original model–one of Kodak’s employees named Shirley Page. Subsequent cards with other models took on this name of being a ‘Shirley Card’ as well.

Shirley Card, 1978. Image credit: New York Times (Courtesy of Hermann Zschiegner)

Photography is not just a system of calibrating light, but a technology of subjective decisions.

Sarah Lewis

For many decades, the chemical solutions used to develop colour film left out the chemical solutions meant to bring out reddish, yellow, and brown tones.

Shooting film for lighter skin tones hence looked good, darker skin tones didn’t look good, especially noticeable in photos with people of lighter and darker skin tones—person with darker skin tone would lose features in their faces, except for whites of eyes and teeth.

1960s and 70s: Although Kodak received complaints from parents about graduation photos not capturing colour contrast in diverse groups, the main force of change was due to demand from wood furniture companies and chocolate companies, because photos taken for advertising weren’t rendering differences in tones of wood and milk/dark chocolate.

!!!

It was never black flesh that was addressed as a serious problem at the time.

Earl Kage, Kodak’s former manager of research and the head of Color Photo Studios

In 1990s, designers started to make film and tv cameras that balanced lighter and darker skin tones individually, dual skin-tone balancing technologies.

Around same time, Black Shirley card developed, and Latino Shirley card, and multiracial Shirley cards.

Kodak’s Multiracial Shirley Card, North America. 1995. Image credit: New York Times (Courtesy of Dr. Lorna Roth, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada)

Problematic colour rendering of darker skin tones included reproduction of facial images without details, lighting issues, facial skin colours that look ashen, strong contrast of skin with whites of eyes and teeth.

This would cause some people to retreat from having their photos taken, because couldn’t get an accurate likeness.

Development of Kodak Gold Max film, advertised as having greater dynamic range, resulted in consumer market film that was “able to photograph the details of a dark horse in lowlight”–Kodak’s coded way of saying their film could now photograph darker skin tones that it hadn’t been developed to do before.

What lingering and ongoing effects has this had on representation of diversity in media? Learned preference for lighter skin occurs in many parts of the world and starts early, influenced by media representation.

Syreeta McFadden–a writer and English professor at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York–writes about erasure, about how it was impossible during her youth to capture a decent likeness of herself so she started retreating from situations involving group photos being taken, knowing that “the lighter you were, the more likely it was that the camera–the film–got your likeness right.”

They’re called Shirley cards, named after the first woman to post for them. She is wearing a white dress with long black gloves. A pearl bracelet adorns one of her wrists. She has auburn hair that drapes her exposed shoulders. Her eyes are blue. The background is grayish, and she is surrounded by thre pillows, each in one of the primary colors we’re taught in school. She wears a white dress because it reads high contrast against the gray background with her black gloves. “Colour girl” is the technicians’ term for her. The image is used as a metric for skin-color balance, which technicians use to render an image as close as possible to what the human eye recognizes as normal. But there’s the rub: With a white body as a light meter, all other skin tones become deviations from the norm.”

Syreeta McFadden, in “Teaching the Camera to See My Skin”

Chalking it up to inadequacies of the photographer, rather than deficiencies in the performance of the film emulsion, she discusses how she adapted to film technology, like other African-Americans did: ensuring the subjects were well lit (so as not to underexpose their skin tones), buying more expensive lenses with wider apertures to let in more light, using professional-grade films that could shoot under lower light conditions at faster speeds.

In the 1990s, McFadden herself began using black and white film instead of colour, where brown skin “didn’t look so off against white skin” and she could “capture blackness without producing a distortion of it.”

She references a 2013 exhibition by artists Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, To Photograph the Details of a Dark Horse in Low Light, where they explored racism in film photography by photographing the countryside in South Africa using Polaroid’s vintage ID2 camera and 40-year-old film originally designed for white skin. This ID2 camera was used by authorities in South Africa to photograph black people for passbooks, which black citizens were required to carry with them when travelling outside of designated areas. The camera featured a flash boost of light, which enabled it to expose film for people with dark skin tones–a tool of racial segregation and enforcement of the apartheid era in South Africa.

In Broomberg and Chanarin’s exhibition, photographs instead depict the beautiful flora and fauna of the South African countryside “in an attempt by the artists to subvert what they say was the camera’s original, sinister intent” (David Smith, The Guardian, 2013).

I.D. 2 (2012) by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Image credit: Phaidon
I.D. 17 (2012) by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Image credit: Phaidon
I.D. 10 (2012) by Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin. Image credit: Phaidon

McFadden begins using colour film again in the 2000s, using Fuji film, which she says “still struggles with a bias toward lightness in its color standard. But it does seem to be more forgiving to darker skin.”

The absence of our likeness accurately rendered in photographs is one more piece of the construct of white supremacy. Film stocks that can’t show us accurately help to control the narrative around appearance, and shapes our reality and the value of our lives in American society. If we are invisible, we are unvalued and inhuman. Beasts. Black bodies accepted as menacing, lit in ways that cloak our features in shadows.

Syreeta McFadden

McFadden primarily shoots in colour now, aiming to retrieve what the camera and photography obscure.

From “Teaching My Camera To See My Skin”, BuzzFeed News, 2014. Photos by Syreeta McFadden. All Rights Reserved.

References

  • https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/lens/sarah-lewis-racial-bias-photography.html
  • https://www.vox.com/2015/9/18/9348821/photography-race-bias
  • https://www.openculture.com/2018/07/color-film-was-designed-to-take-pictures-of-white-people-not-people-of-color.html
  • https://syreetamcfadden.com/
  • https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/syreetamcfadden/teaching-the-camera-to-see-my-skin
  • https://www.phaidon.com/agenda/photography/articles/2013/january/28/new-show-explores-racism-in-photography/
  • http://www.broombergchanarin.com/text-racism-of-early-colour

“Shit Happens – Notes on Awkwardness” by Amy Sillman

No longer making things for truth or beauty, while ‘negative aesthetics’ doesn’t quite describe either what a lot of artists are doing

Awkwardness is form that matches feeling or condition of “funny, homely, lonely, ill-fitting, strange, clumsy things that feel right.”

“Perhaps this is particular to abstract painting, where you often don’t really ‘know’ what you’re doing, and so you are doomed to work in between hoping and groping.” – I love this! Working within the realm of trying to grab what may be *just* out of reach.

Amy Sillman says just having a body is a daily comedy—our body is a “loose baggy monster” we find ourselves in, a “laughable casement” that farts, has ankles that swell and has rolls of fat jutting out, it excretes, and eventually our “loose baggy monster” dies.

“Pretty in Pink” by Michelle Bui, 2019.

A series that comes to mind is Michelle Bui’s work in her exhibition Mutable Materialism at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, BC this past summer. Michelle Bui is an artist whose photographic still lifes are described as having both painterly and sculptural approaches, are mainly comprised of everyday objects that are seemingly unremarkable.

“Baby’s Breath” by Michelle Bui, 2019.

Her photographs are sort of beautiful and sort of ugly, but also not beautiful and not ugly. The compositions are absurd forms made up of straws, flowers, sausage casings, and upholstery foam, for example, that are placed in positions where they are precariously balanced, confrontational, looking uncomfortable and photographed at the moment when they are about to collapse or perish.

“Oyster” by Michelle Bui, 2021.
“Mikado” by Michelle Bui, 2022.
“Le Membranes (Boyaux)” by Michelle Bui, 2021.
‘Mutable Materialism’ by Michelle Bui, 2022, installation view, Yaletown–Roundhouse Station, Vancouver, in collaboration with Capture Photography Festival and Contemporary Art Gallery. Photo credit: Rachel Topham Photography

Situated in the public sphere, Michelle Bui’s photographs employ the visual language of advertising and are enlarged to a scale reminiscent of billboards. Evoking the senses, they stir up awkward feelings of unsettling seduction.

2 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized