Weird Seduction: The Unsettling Pleasure of Michelle Bui’s “Centerfold”

What physical truths elude photographic representation? 

Can the sensory and spatial qualities of an object—size, weight, feel or smell—be conveyed accurately through an image? I’ve been thinking about the translation process from the physical to the photograph since visiting Michelle Bui’s solo show “Centerfold” at Montreal’s Parisian Laundry this past Spring. Within Parisian’s spacious central room, seven towering framed photographs and four smaller punctuated the white gallery walls with brazen pops of colour⁠. Through the careful arrangement of seemingly unrelated objects like bars of soap, plastic baubles, twisted ceramics, dried flowers, and mysterious meat products, Bui presents bold still lives that defy the real-life scale of their subjects. With a clear awareness of the malleability that photography grants, Bui exploits the medium’s blindspots to create monuments out of miniature objects. The images in “Centerfold” present an aesthetics of the weird, conjuring both pleasurable and confounding sensations in their onlookers. 

When attempting to articulate my experiences in front of Bui’s almost billboard-sized photographs, I realize that most of my descriptions refer to the senses. I note the squeaking of knotted rubber gloves and the crunch of dried wildflowers in Baby’s Breath (2019), the cold slickness of raw meat in True Feeling (2019), and the acridity of a dirty ashtray in Still Alive (2019). In the latter, velvet, pearls, chorded green tendrils, two crunchy paper husks and fresh flowers combine to create a melange of crinkly and soft textures. This unexpected grouping of materials invokes familiar sensory memories, albeit in an unfamiliar configuration. Being presented with touchable scenes only available to the eyes, the viewer begins to intuitively fill the sensory gaps. I imagine what it would feel like to run my hands over the plush blue fabric in the background of Baby’s Breath (2019) or the honey-coloured velvet in Still Alive (2019). Bui’s images offer beginnings—points of combustion that elicit an array of physical feelings. However tangible these impressions seem, they remain ghostly spectres of sensation unique to each viewer’s experience. 

These embodied moments offered by the photographs may be a result of Bui’s past training in sculpture and consequent comfort playing with three-dimensionality. Though often working with photos, Bui’s multidisciplinary practice remains deeply spatial. During a visit to her Montreal studio, I saw evidence of this physical process of composition. Remnants of “Centerfold”, including a shiny red tabletop photo backdrop, miscellaneous objects, fabrics and umbrella-diffused lights, were still evident in the room. Play and intuition guide Bui’s tactile process as she assembles and disassembles various items, flexing her sculptural instincts until something fits. Her objects and materials are sourced during regular walks through Montreal’s Plaza Saint Hubert and Chabanel district, areas replete with textile and specialty craft shops. She prefers finding materials as “they appear on [her] road” rather than seeking particular items out. Juxtapositions of material form the subject matter for several of Bui’s works, for instance, the combinations of synthetic plastics and organics like meat and flora, paired with a yellow plastic hand in True Feelings (2019) or shiny latex-like material in Twisted Musk (2019). Clearly, intuitive exploration and haptic play guide Bui’s compositional choices, this sculptural process tangible in the final pieces. As demonstrated by the works in “Centerfold,” Bui is uniquely adept at composing vivid scenes that, once photographed, seem to vibrate with unreal saturation, scale, and sensuality. 

Bui’s object-based compositional aesthetic recalls the work of several contemporaries. Not unlike the serene cool of Celia Perrin Sidarous’s photographic work or the colourful hues of Alison Postma’s still lives, there is an inherently satisfying quality to Bui’s images. It’s clear that the meticulously arranged objects in her photographs are chosen for colour and texture over utility, thereby divorcing them from their traditional roles. The compositions of Sidarous, Postma, and Bui all suggest a deep learning of objects’ myriad properties, exhausting their multifarious facets and modes of existence. This approach perhaps nods towards Jane Bennett’s theories in Vibrant Matter, whose Object-Oriented Ontology asks more what an object can do beyond just what it is. Rather than focusing on the gravitas of an object’s embedded history or or its angular aesthetics, approaches seen in Sidarous and Postma’s work, the objects of “Centerfold” seem to shift categories from functional and familiar to purely textural. 

As human interactions become increasingly mediated via 2D surfaces, questions arise concerning the murky space between an image’s subject and its representation and how it may be exploited. Though not obvious at first glance, Bui’s decision to present her carefully composed objects as photographs puts this body of work in dialogue with the evolving effects of contemporary communication technology. Print and virtual advertisements, for instance, are masterful examples of image manipulation. Bui’s choice of the title “Centerfold” directly references the magazine format, with that seductive centre spread brimming with the promise of pleasure. Outside of these familiar marketing formats, the skills required to construct identity, narrative, and fantasy are becoming ever more democratized, with social media platforms revealing the ease at which an unspecialized audience has absorbed and sharpened their self-branding abilities. Bui’s towering totems to both regular and weird objects mimic the glossiness of a luxury magazine spread, but with a clear awareness of the power that seductive aesthetics hold in their ability to mislead an audience. Her images feel like an experiment in trying to frame and sell the unsettling, pairing commercial studio techniques with unexpected subject-matter. By replacing products with the subtly perverse arrangements of strange objects and textures, the audience is left asking just what these images are trying to sell. 

There’s a risk to adopting such familiar and marketable aesthetics, however, especially with a young medium like photography whose place within contemporary art is perhaps still being defined. The immediacy of such satisfying vignettes might threaten the impact and hold of the final pieces. Can they maintain the attention of audiences trained to consume images at rapid fire speed? Can their existence as commodities in the commercial art world circumvent “decoration” and actually express critical complexity? With beautifully arranged photographs, one might have to search for the seedy underbelly and excavate possible strata of meaning. 

Bui’s images, though ably functioning as beautiful objects, skirt the risk of presenting solely as “pretty pictures” by virtue of their weirdness. When seeing them in person, I’m struck by the sensation that, though beautiful, something just isn’t quite right. Late British cultural theorist Mark Fisher’s reflections in The Weird and the Eerie (2016) offer an entry point for considering these gut reactions: feelings that are internalized before spoken or experienced before understood. Fisher describes the weird as involving “a sense of wrongness: a weird entity or object so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist, or at least it should not exist here.”² These moments of disorientation rearrange our previous understanding of how objects should function, where they should be, and what they should signify. Organs belong inside the body, but in Bui’s work, they’re removed, abjected, creating a dull sense of horror. In Pretty in Pink (2017), fleshy sinews hang from what looks like a bone. They are limp and deflated like a jellyfish lifted from the sea, garnished with perverse cuteness by two pink flowers and backed by a flat plane of primary red. The potential grotesqueness of this combination is assuaged by the shiny packaging of product photography, in essence polishing and presenting something viscerally disgusting. This flirting with the abject³ presents a polemic: the dual sensation, and perhaps the opposite sides of the same coin, of reverence and disgust. Fisher’s discussion of the Lacanian term jouissance, “an enjoyment that entails the inextricability of pleasure and pain”⁴, resonates deeply within Bui’s work. The “obscene jelly”⁵ of jouissance is experienced in the joint perversity and ease of deriving pleasure from the sheen of suspended innards like those in Pretty in Pink (2017) or the soft fuzziness of grapes with plastic seams in Des pommes et des raisins (2019). The unsettlingly soothing effects of the visuals challenge what we usually associate with pleasure. 

Dancing somewhere between Fisher’s descriptions of the eerie and the weird, the jarring discomfort of abject art and the Freudian uncanny, Bui’s work brings together objects without connection in the utilitarian world, but does so with surprising coherence. This aesthetic harmony can in part be attributed to the sense of familiarity that the images seem to evoke, articulated by Fisher’s interpretation of the uncanny as “the strange within the familiar, the strangely familiar, the familiar as strange.”⁶ Through the slightly disquieting assembly of recognizable objects that might provoke revulsion when seen together, the images present a new kind of weird: one that is seductive, alluring, shiny in its finish and primed for consumption. A visual feast of oddities, as pleasurable as they can be off-putting. Bui’s collection foregrounds the divide between what we think we understand about the objects depicted and their new, rearranged existence as photographs. 

I was confronted with the disorienting distinction between a thing and its representation when in Bui’s studio. Looking around, I recognized some of the subjects of her “Centerfold” photographs. I saw the plastic hand from True Feelings (2019); it was bigger than I had imagined. Next to it, the plastic tomatoes and grapes of Des pommes et des raisins (2019). These objects were clustered together on an unassuming table, demanding no special attention amidst the busyness of an artist’s studio. Taking in my surroundings, I experienced a curious moment of displacement. My only interaction with these objects had been in their two-dimensional photographed form, the image of the tomatoes and grapes dwarfing me as I stood before the immense frame reaching almost three metres above the ground. By maneuvering the language of photography, Bui stimulates a transformation for these objects, whereby they alter from actual-size to monumental scale. These photographic shrines demand a type of reverence, one that, after experiencing, is hard to reconcile with the normalcy of the original object. 

These duelling sensations of recognition and unfamiliarity jostle our usual reference systems, creating a moment of confusion as a mental conception is confronted with a different reality. But even without the experience that I had—of meeting the subjects of Bui’s images in their everyday averageness—her photos hint at that unsettling divide. By willfully confounding her audience through the use of ambiguous scale, unidentifiable materials and objects just recognizable enough to detect that something is off, Bui’s work hints at the potential fallacy of photography. She asks her audience to consider the limitations of what a photograph can capture and convey. Scratching at the weirdness of representation, the works in “Centerfold” give us just enough to catch our fingers on, tempting us to peel back the facade. 

Emma Sharpe organizes, writes and edits in Montreal, where she currently co-facilitates an experimental arts writing group with Esmé Hogeveen. She holds a BFA from NSCAD University and an MA in Communication & Culture from Ryerson and York University. 

Endnotes:

1. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: a Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
2. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater Books, 2016), 19.
3. For more on the abject, see: Julia Kristeva Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
4. Fisher, 22.
5. Fisher, 23.
6. Fisher, 11.

This article is published in issue 36.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue