Tag Archives: McBride Contemporain

999 Words

Crazy Clown Time: notes on the weird visions of Beth Frey and Ana Sokolović

“…no frame is secure, all attempts at embedding fail.”
—Mark Fisher, “Curtains and Holes: David Lynch”

At the age of 65, the American filmmaker provocateur David Lynch in 2011 announced his debut solo recording, Crazy Clown Time. Upon its release, the album confounded listeners and critics in large part because traditional analytic criteria could not effectively be applied to it. Was Crazy Clown Time “good?” The answer seemingly necessitated a revaluation of goodness.

Crazy Clown Time was music made by an artist predominantly known for visual arts and the moving image. It was deliberately difficult to generically categorize, encompassing elements of surf rock, spoken word, electronic music, and blues. It was undoubtedly skillful, sonically speaking. But it was impossible to assign a value judgement to these purely arbitrary qualities.

Crazy Clown Time was weird. And Lynch had cultivated a reputation throughout his cultlike career for producing weird artworks. So, it was good at being that. But was weird good?

A similar question faces us when considering a spate of recent weird works including those of the visual artist Beth Frey and the composer Ana Sokolović. Frey’s exhibition, Autoeffigies, and Sokolović’s new operatic oeuvre, Clown(s), both offer representations of self-conscious weirdness that defy typical critique and precipitate a new rubric for analysis. They also beg observers to consider this moment and why now is the appropriate time for these jester-like gestures.

Beth Frey’s work hinges upon the aesthetics of malfunctioning Artificial Intelligence, her viral Instagram account @sentientmuppetfactory receiving exponential attention in the wake of contemporary conversations around the use of A.I. in fine art. One of the more consequential topics in those conversations is what constitutes noteworthiness in this era of art’s artificially intelligent reproduction. With A.I.’s assistance, it has never been simpler to prompt the production of clownish farce.

“It’s very easy to make an interesting image now,” Frey tells CBC arts journalist Chris Hampton, “so I think my conception of interestingness has changed.” For Frey, the facility of generating weird images using technological tools means setting a higher bar for expressing the weird.

Sokolović’s Clown(s) expands the formal elements of conventional opera to achieve an impression of weirdness, for example, beginning the performance with the house lights still up, and warping the customary canned announcement imploring patrons to turn off their electronic devices.

Throughout the following 115 minutes, Sokolović proceeds to draw upon other artistic traditions, like puppetry and acrobatics, to deform the audience’s notions of normalcy. Using clowns as her subject becomes a more peripheral choice that punctuates rather than constitutes the work’s predominant themes. Clown(s) is not weird. It is, instead, about weirdness.

The cast of Clown(s) onstage at Théâtre Maisonneuve, 3 February 2026. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Mark Fisher was our generation’s most astute cultural observer to precisely define and acutely examine the weird. “A weird entity or object is so strange that it makes us feel that it should not exist,” wrote Fisher in his book The Weird and the Eerie, “or at least it should not exist here.”

And yet the persistence of a weird thing, here and now, upsets the legitimacy of the categories with which we have up until the present applied to define and make sense of the world. And so, we are tasked with the choice to begrudgingly accept the troubling and uncanny nature of whatever strikes us as weird, or to redefine our structural categories and reorder the irreconcilable.

The recurrence of clowns is apt. They are undeniably weird. Clowns characterize a complex impetus in human activity. Ostensibly, they intend to amuse and entertain us. But clowns’ antics more often provoke a sense of anxiety and fear in their audiences, especially the innocent. There is always something sinister lurking beneath the explicit attempt to elicit delight.

The problem today is not weirdness itself but its overabundance, a deluge of delusion. 15 years after Lynch’s magnum opus, there is no more befitting a description for this historical moment than Crazy Clown Time. Ours is an age of insane clown posses — ICE, IDF, GRU — assembled within the confines of the greatest national superpowers for the purposes of performing absurdity spectacularly.

Although it may not be enough just to say that our leaders are clowns turning reality into a circus. What they are effectively doing is forcing us to tolerate and hyper-normalize increasingly intolerable and hyper-abnormal circumstances, with the other option being resistance in a system into which a certain level of resistance is acceptable — indeed beneficial — to perpetuating that system.

The third alternative is resistance so disruptive that it threatens to destabilize not just the clown show but the entire circus. The possibility of leaning into instability politically may be manifesting in our works of art first as a form of dress rehearsal for real revolution. It is under the jurisdiction of art, after all, where we can conceive weird disruptions with fewer consequences — and perfect them through habituation and practice. A sane reaction to externally imposed insanity is to induce it internally, under controlled conditions, observe the results, and adapt accordingly.

Throughout his lifetime, David Lynch encouraged audiences to confront what was wrong about weirdness, and in doing so, redefine what is right about order, what is necessary about radical sensemaking, and the inevitability of the conundrums that force positive change. Presumably in 2011, Lynch could have done whatever he wanted, including doing absolutely nothing. What he did do, however, was to position a text entitled Crazy Clown Time before a captive public that would seriously consider it, classify and categorize it, placing it within a grander context.

It is significant that both Beth Frey and Ana Sokolović are producing their crazy, carnivalesque output in the context of a time and place that presents ever-fewer options for immediate survival. This is not only interesting but also important work that serves to reevaluate the political valence of art. Faced with their own versions of infinite choice, these artists elect to gerrymander the map of weirdsville and bring more of us together under its big top.◼︎

Cover image: Detail, Beth Frey’s Autoeffigies, McBride Contemporain. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Infinity of Primes: in conversation with Andrea Szilasi

“If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.”
―Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Nature speaks in equations.”
―Charles Seife, Zero

The world appears to us as a complex system oscillating between meaning and noise, order and chaos, zero and infinity.

The field of quantum mechanics deploys numbers and language to describe the behaviour of matter at the smallest possible scale. Interestingly, the smaller the scale, the less predictable the behaviour. And yet, meaning emerges. Matter organizes into order. Existence divides and multiplies. Numbers and language render the abstract concrete.

It is these most fundamental building blocks that the artist Andrea Szilasi takes as her raw material to refashion a new vocabulary of images. I meet Szilasi at McBride Contemporain in the Belgo Building to discuss her latest exhibition, entitled Réfléchir, a collection of recent works that blur the lines between photography and collage, writing and cut-ups, science and art.

“I like that game where you say a word over and over again until you don’t recognize it anymore,” Szilasi explains. “I feel like I’m doing that with language and digits and space. I really see the letters and numbers loosening up the meaning of the images.”

Comprised of black-and-white architectural photographs from the 1960s and ‘70s, upon which Szilasi applies broken fragments of vinyl lettering and digits, Réfléchir reflects both backwards in time and projects forwards through space, in doing so, inviting a radical reinterpretation of conventional representational forms.

Gallery views of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

“There are many ways to be in the world,” Szilasi muses. “But obviously language and numbers are pretty basic. There’s a natural sense of order. The sun rises and sets every day and there’s seasons, and we time seconds and minutes and hours and years. ‘Cycles’ is a good word. Raw life is very orderly. And then, of course, it is completely chaotic. People do things to each other that don’t make sense.”

Explanation, however, is not explicitly Szilasi’s intention, preferring to let intuition guide her practice. While she is rigorous, Szilasi is not buttonholed by any traditional doctrines.

“I embrace accidents and chance,” she declares. “When I’m actually making art, nothing is conscious at all. But I consciously do that. I don’t see it in an egotistical way — that it’s my creativity. We all need this complete trust in our intuition. I see it as an active decision to follow intuition. I love dealing with positive and negative space. I think about it a lot. It’s not the most obvious thing. It’s subtle and hidden. Looking at images, they are visual configurations of lights and darks, shapes and colours, regardless of what they’re representing.”

Gallery view of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

Born and raised in Montreal, Szilasi studied French Language and Literature and Film Studies at the University of Toronto and returned to this city to pursue a degree in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. “I loved Eisenstein’s high-contrast images,” she recalls. “And I had a course on Dada and Surrealism in Cinema. It was in me when I was making my early collages — the importance of stream of consciousness as opposed to realism.”

Szilasi had her first solo exhibition in 1994 at Centre Clark. “They were collages,” she remembers, “hand-made using found images from scientific magazines.”

Szilasi got her start in the Montreal arts community as an integral part of artist-run galleries and on various local committees. “I was on the board of Articule,” she tells me. “I think Montreal is a great city for artists. But it’s getting so much more expensive for studios. People used to have huge loft spaces on the Plateau. That was super fun. I knew a lot of painters who had lofts who would ride their bikes to go to the bathroom. That seems like the past.”

In addition to her own noteworthy career, Szilasi shoulders the responsibility of a significant creative legacy. Her father, Gabor, remains among the most recognized and beloved documentary photographers in the province, working from 1959 to 1971 at the Office du film du Québec. Szilasi recalls using her dad’s contact sheets to make collages and greeting cards as a child.

“It’s a really big deal, and it’s a huge, huge influence,” Szilasi acknowledges. “I admire my father’s work, so this is a way of embracing it. I love photography. I’m just using it and physically embracing it, always, in every way. But I would never say I’m a photographer. To be considered a photographer, you need an ability to use the material, the medium, to say what you want to.”

Gallery view of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

McBride Contemporain’s Director Soad Carrier helps to frame Szilasi’s practice from a gallerist’s perspective. “She’s always been interested in wanting to go through the photograph, or under the surface,” says Carrier. “This exhibition taps into that. Even with the title, Réfléchir, there’s a direct reference to the surface of things, and light, and the way it’s refracted and moving.”

Carrier regularly visited Szilasi in her studio over the past year-and-a-half, carefully selecting works to include in the show. “You can see the interaction of the pieces together as they’re being produced,” she says. “It’s really exciting.”

Szilasi’s reluctance to be categorized, rather than conceding to her father’s fame, exposes to me a comfort in interdisciplinarity and a confidence in ambiguity. She walks us over to a series of manipulated Polaroid photographs that figure prominently into her exhibition, images that draw the viewer in with their diminutive size and surprisingly quotidian hyperrealism.

“These are from when I was in art school,” Szilasi tells me. “The actual Polaroids are from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But this past year, I made them into collages. I have other Polaroids that are finished works. But I applied some vinyl letters to these — and there’s also Letraset. I’ve been making photos more over the last few years.”

I ask Szilasi if she ever considered another profession. “No,” she says without hesitation. “But I remember thinking that before going into studio arts, it’s good to have another background in more historical, academic things. So that’s what I did.”

Gallery views of Andrea Szilasi’s Réfléchir. Guy L’Heureux for McBride Contemporain.

A sense of place manifests less in Szilasi’s visual images than it did in her father’s. She says, “I try to get beneath geography and politics.” Nonetheless, the risks she takes as an artist are indicative of an ecosystem that encourages us to measure the arts’ value differently. It is not just a game of numbers.

“Art is the first thing that gets cut in budgets,” Szilasi laments.

“I think art is so essential for people being able to notice subtleties and just listen to each other and all those things that we don’t see in politicians, or in the media. Indirectly, art does affect politics because it has to do with value systems. Even in really concrete ways, when people do drawings, you forget what you’re looking at. It gives an openness. That’s the role of art. I used to take it for granted. But now it’s something that has to be defended, politically. Art is about values. But there’s less value in the arts. Art is an outlet for everything. It builds empathy. I think about that all the time.”◼︎

Réfléchir runs through 21 February 2026 at McBride Contemporain, 372 Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Suite 414.

Cover image for NicheMTL courtesy of McBride Contemporain and the artist.

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Ignoring van Gogh

Heith with Orchestroll and Audréanne Fillion, Espace SAT, 12 July 2024

Orchestroll perform at SAT, 12 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I know a lot of people who want to quit doing the things that they know are bad for them. Smoking, drinking, eating crap food, taking drugs, toxic relationships — these kinds of things.

For some reason, many of these people come to me as if I have answers for them. Maybe it’s because I have stopped doing all of these things myself, and they believe that I can magically ladle them out of that thick soup of addiction.

Sorry, I can’t. Nobody can.

These people think that there is some light that will switch on, or off, when someone like me shows them the secret, or some useful doctor prescribes the right antidote, or recommends replacing one compulsion with another. They try to change their friends, or their work, or move house. They think that by rearranging everything around them, something inside them will be altered, too.

People ask me if I feel better now.

No. But I feel. My sense of feeling has improved, both pleasure and pain, happiness and sorrow.

So yes, I suppose that technically speaking, I do feel better now. And yet I still don’t know how to feel.

Learning to feel again is the opposite of riding a bike. Once you learn, you immediately forget. It’s like being a goldfish, swimming forever around the castle in the feelings fishbowl.

There is no sage advice, no magic formula. The sole equation that exists, which is rather quotidian, is Life + Time = X.

The only advice I can offer for people who want to stop, for instance, smoking, is just to stop smoking. Stop putting combustible sticks in your mouth and lighting them. And keep stopping doing that. Stop lighting combustible sticks in your mouth until you don’t feel like lighting combustible sticks in your mouth anymore.

And even after that, keep stopping. Never go back. Just stop for good.

The worst thing anyone can do who wants to stop doing something is to start doing that thing again. You cannot reward yourself for an extended period of abstinence with short bursts of indulgence.

If there is one weird trick to quitting anything, it’s to learn to enjoy not wanting, say, cigarettes, or alcohol, or smack, or your crazy ex, or whatever it is that you so badly want. Learn to love unconsummated longing, and suddenly, you will find fulfillment in absolutely everything. And nothing.

The less you need to satisfy yourself, the freer you will feel.

What then? Then you die. Full-stop.

Music & Nature, Private home of Nabil Fawaz, 13 July 2024

Yuki Isami and Nabil Fawaz perform impromptu at Mr. Fawaz’s private residence, 13 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Among the first films ever made is a short by the Lumière brothers called “Feeding the Baby.”

It depicts in documentary form precisely that: Auguste Lumière and his wife, Marguerite, feeding their infant daughter, Andrée.

Still, the subtext of this film is noteworthy. Cinema feeds its audiences the images that form our consensus.

There is a reason why our timelines are called “feeds” — and the text at the bottom of a newscast is coined “the crawl.”

A Nearly Tangible Fiction, Patel Brown, Until 17 August 2024

Malik McKoy, when can we start using emojis as titles?, 2023, acrylic and yarn on canvas. Photographed for NicheMTL.

A fundamental difference exists between galleries and museums.

Generally, curators run art galleries with a passion for art. Galleries have to make money, too, because operating a gallery is labour, like any other kind of labour. And labourers deserve to be paid. Art labourers work hard finding art.

Art museums, on the other hand, are far more monetarily concerned. We mistakenly believe that curators run art museums, too. This is false.

Art museums are run by PR and marketing teams who work two days a week and meet over Zoom, or Zoom over Teams. Art museums are run by risk management departments and accountants who devise and revise ever-shrinking budgets on ever-expanding Excel spreadsheets. Players more than workers run museums.

If ever there was an artist as original and talented today as a van Gogh, even if he or she or they crawled into the museum bloodied and overdosing and earless, the players who run them would never take notice.

They’d be too busy counting Instagram followers like sheep and unconsciously refreshing their newsfeeds, looking everywhere except in front of their faces for the next big thing.

Museums are where great art gets lost. Art galleries are where great art is found.

Vagabond Shoes, McBride Contemporain, Until 17 August 2024

Eun-Ha Paek, Mongmong Lassies Double, 2024, Glazed stoneware with luster, 16.5 x 21.6 x 8.3 cm. McBride Contemporain.

We are taught to forgive those who trespass against us, for they know not what they do. Most people, when they do us harm, feel a sense of remorse. So, it’s easy to forgive. If someone apologizes for their trespasses, it inclines exoneration.

But what happens when people who trespass against us aren’t sorry, when they don’t feel a sense of remorse, when they know precisely what they do?

There’s less teaching for that.

Jessica Moss with Radwan Ghazi Moumneh and Frédéric D. Oberland, Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024

Jessica Moss performs at Hotel2Tango, 20 July 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant between me and the earth. And it shall come to pass, when I bring cloud over the earth, that the bow shall be seen in the cloud: And I will remember my covenant, which is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh. —Genesis 9:13-15

There are no coincidences.

Not because everything happens for a reason. But rather, because we alone manufacture the often-arcane meanings we ascribe to concurrent or successive events.

These meanings are only meaningful insofar as they are collectively felt, or whether we are capable of communicating and convincing others of their circumstantial, synchronous significance.

Take, for example, the full-horizon double rainbow that occurred over the Van Horne underpass about an hour before Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, Frédéric D. Oberland, and Jessica Moss were set to perform at Hotel2Tango.

There is nothing inherently meaningful in a deluge of summer rain and the natural prismatic phenomenon that occurs just afterwards. There is no symbolic significance to rainbows taking place before a gig — or for that matter at any given time. There is only scientific significance to light refracting through water.

Nonetheless, it was a coincidence. Know what I mean?◼︎

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What, Me Worry?

Lung, Adrianne Munden-Dixon, Lung (Self-released / Bandcamp)

My 16th birthday was spent unlike most kids’ 16th birthdays. That is, I hope it was, anyway.

I hope to God that most people on their sweet sixteenth don’t take massive doses of LSD and devote the night with friends to watching David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, listening to Cabaret Voltaire 45’s on 33RPM, and laughing uncontrollably at pretty much everything.

It was a more innocent time back then — 1993, to be exact — and there was much less in the world to be truly worried about. The Soviet Union had recently dissolved; Ukraine was an independent nation again. There was no real internet to speak of. There were no cell phones, no social media.

U.S. President Bill Clinton hadn’t yet stained any blue dresses. O.J. Simpson was still a former running back and a second-rate actor. Donald Trump was just an embittered blowhard billionaire. Ok, maybe some things don’t change.

Nonetheless, in 1993, we were merely a bunch of wacky suburban youths experimenting with our own brain chemistry. No big deal.

Among the things that had us in stitches that night was one of Matt Groening’s pre-Simpsons-era Life in Hell comic books, which we leafed through at the peak of our collective trip. The drawing in question was a rendering of a phony magazine cover with outrageously absurd headlines — flatly stupid articles that Groening must have considered that no one would write, much less want to read.

I remember the headline that floored us that particular night was, “Thinking about string.” I recall that we laughed so hard that our faces hurt, and our sides were sore. We were literally bursting. I had never before found anything as funny as the idea of thinking about string. The ridiculousness, the preposterousness of it. What about string was there to really think about, we thought?

But then, we really thought about string. And the more we thought about it, the more we realized that there was actually lots about string to think about. Rather deeply, in fact. String contained multitudes of fascination and mystery and enigmatic attraction.

We held no notions in 1993 of theoretical physics, or Schrödinger’s cat, or probability — probably. And yet, in that moment, we did. String suddenly pulled into sharp focus the alpha and the omega, the be-all and the end-all of the entire universe.

The acid wore off long ago, thankfully. But I’m not sure if I have ever completely stopped thinking about string. To this day, my mind unravels like a ball of yarn at its mere mention.

Jeremy Shaw, Phase Shifting Index, Fonderie Darling

Was the entirety of the Darling Foundry carpeted for Jeremy Shaw’s stunning video installation just so that audiences, if necessary, could cut a rug?

Rafael Payare and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 29 February 2024

The Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri’s In the half-light, which serves as the opening act for the OSM, is apropos for the moment. We are only half-awake. We are only half-aware. Half of us are always sleeping, and half of us don’t even know it.

It seems as if the world is split in half. As many advancements as we have made, we have also lost ground, spinning our wheels, making no progress. The last thing the world wanted was another war, and now we have two.

We could stay in the half-light forever. Or we could break through this wall of darkness. In God, there is no darkness at all.

Adrian Norvid, Best Friends For Never, with Marcela Szwarc, McBride Contemporain

On the surface, it might seem difficult to draw any link between the works of Adrian Norvid and his partner, the painter Janet Werner. Werner’s art renders solemn depictions of juxtaposed fashion photography, whereas Norvid’s is more pedestrian, cartoonish, and jokey. Werner’s paintings are exclusively visual, whereas Norvid frequently incorporates text, puns, and plays on words. Werner’s art is collected in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, whereas Norvid’s is more at home in edgier collections like the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art.

But dive a little deeper and we see that the two intersect at Al Jaffee, the American illustrator who for over half a decade skewered pop culture in Mad Magazine. Norvid’s technique unmistakably echoes Jaffee’s own — sitting somewhere amongst Heavy Metal and Robert Crumb, with a wry gothic wit. And Werner’s works, to me, have always recalled the magazine’s back pages, the iconic Jaffee-innovated fold-in that reveals another message when the page is creased in on itself.

Here we go with another ridiculous theory.

Shary Boyle, Vesselling, Patel Brown, until 20 April 2024

“Put all your love into everything you do,” instructs Shary Boyle at her artist’s talk on March 2nd at Patel Brown in the Belgo Building.

A large group is assembled to listen to Boyle speak about a collection of new and, even though they appear highly accomplished, apparently experimental works that encompass multimedia paintings, drawing on paper, and fired ceramics — works that are at once tactile and untouchable, fantastical and real, beautiful and terrifying.

Boyle says a number of insightful things during her lecture. She doesn’t believe in evil or purity, but she does believe in fury and insistence. To be sure, there is much right now to be furious about, and even more upon which to insist.

I worry in the future that certain cultures — what we call “delicate ecosystems” — will simply die out. Ukrainian, and Palestinian, and perhaps even Quebecois culture in 100 years will be subsumed by their bigger, louder, and more violent neighbours. When generations to come look back to piece together what happened, they will look to these culture’s artworks to make sense of our hopes and fears, morals and values, and ultimately, what went wrong.

Unlike Boyle, I do believe in both evil and purity — the purity of stupidity. As Margaret Atwood once said, “Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.”◼︎

Cover image: Shary Boyle‘s Grafters series.

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999 Words

Matter Out Of Place: in conversation with Michelle Bui

The sumptuous images of the Montreal photographic artist Michelle Bui expose complex systems at work: Natural and artificial systems; human and nonhuman systems; ordered and chaotic systems; digital and analogue systems.

Then, there are the objects and materials that Bui chooses, which often defy identification. But they speak nonetheless through their selection. And as yearbooks or family photos would, they reassemble stories of resemblance and social agency.

“The selection process is really important to me,” Bui says, as we examine her newest works collected in a stunning exhibition, entitled Affinités poreuses, on view at McBride Contemporain in Montreal’s iconic Édifice Belgo. “It starts with two images that trigger another image. Then, I know that meaning will come — the poetry of it will come through.”

Bui’s lyrical works can be categorized as still-life photographs, but there are sculptural, textual, and ideological features to them, too. Her images have been reproduced at enormous scale and recontextualized into metropolitan environments — as in her 2022 Vancouver Contemporary Art Gallery show, Mutable Materialism — which redrew the borders between commercial and public space.

“There’s the idea of advertising sometimes in my work,” Bui explains, “and it’s nice to see it competing with other advertising that is there. We’re taking up the space of advertisements.”

Left: String of pearl beads’ coating, bean thread noodles, 60×48. Right: Cadmium green chiffon, blue recycling bag, 60×48. McBride Contemporain.

In addition to the abstraction of consumerist desire, there is an ASMR-like quality to Bui’s most recent photographed assemblages. They elicit an autonomic, almost affective response, on one hand because of their abstractness, and on the other due to their familiarity. “There’s something democratic about the objects that I use,” Bui reveals. “There’s a keen interest in finding objects that we can all relate to, and how they’re all presented together.”

Bui habitually integrates items from her garden, the back alley, and particularly rubbish. “I can go through the trash, basically, and look for those objects that are usually thrown away,” she confesses, laughing. “It’s another way of looking at art. There’s always a discovery to be made, a flower to be discovered, or a colour that can strike you when you stop on your way. That’s how I see the images I build — those elements that have stopped me on my walks before. It speaks of my direct environment.”

Describing herself as a “true Montrealer,” Bui is a graduate of the customary Dawson, Concordia, UQAM route to Fine Arts. During her Master’s degree, though, she attended the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and returned home with a more streamlined artistic vision. “It’s a different way of working over there,” Bui says of her European instruction. “It’s like an atelier, and it’s about the reduction of your art, simplifying what you want to project.”

Though a sharp sense of focus characterizes her body of work, Bui arrived circuitously at artistic practice. “It was a long path of understanding,” she recalls. “It wasn’t something that was presented in my family — they are immigrants from Vietnam. So, as you know, art is never the most practical thing to show your kids. But for so many reasons, and for my own interest, and also the way our family works, I think I was kind of pushed towards art. It was a steady path. I’m like a marathoner.”

Left: Bellflower petals, scented plastic bag, 60×48. Right: Abalone shell, mica powder, salmon scales, 60×48. McBride Contemporain.

Bui came of age steeped in images from across art history, her father frequently taking the family to the library to read up on Greek and Roman antiquity. But it wasn’t until her teenage years that she experienced more transcendent encounters with contemporary art.

“I remember seeing Nan Goldin in 2003,” Bui says, “and Jean Cocteau at the Musée des Beaux-Arts. I was about 16 at the time. I just remember the velvet red curtains and that whole experience of intimacy. It was the same thing with Nan Goldin. Such a powerful but intimate exhibition. I was like, ‘okay, I want to do that. I don’t know how, it doesn’t make sense right now, but I’ll follow that.’”

Bui places herself within a tradition of artists who collect and assemble such sundry items that reflect upon our systemic and interconnected worldview, specifically citing the German artist Annette Kelm. “She has a really rational approach to photography,” explains Bui. “They go beyond the signification of what they are. She talks all about the history of those objects, the patterns that she uses, and thinks a lot about capitalism. I think I touch on that in my work.”

The local ceramics artist Celia Perrin Sidarous rates highly for Bui, too. “I think she is an influence on many artists in Montreal, actually. The way I work is like being in the kitchen, so there’s lots of gestures and materials that are borrowed from everywhere. Sometimes it’s more painterly. Other times, it’s more about the archive of the objects. It all goes in, meshes in.”

Left: Bone, silk sea sponge, 68×48. Right: Dried orchid, peach flesh, 68×48. McBride Contemporain.

I can’t help but discern a wealth of dichotomies emerging from Bui’s keen camera eye. There’s the ever-present tension between hygiene and disease, purity and pollution, the selected and the discarded, and what is valuable versus what constitutes waste.

The multiplicity of everyday and exotic objects that Bui curates into her still-lifes communicate meaning through the contagion of pleasure prior to identification, the virality of sheer sensation, and the infection of juxtaposition. An apt description for Bui’s oeuvre might be the British Sociologist Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt — as an “omnibus compendium which includes all the rejected elements of ordered systems.”

Still, for Bui, it’s about patiently awaiting a feeling from her images, some singular awareness in the viewer that’s arrived at through the careful and intentional collection and presentation of seemingly miscellaneous aesthetic artifacts.

“I am always seeing an emotion. And if I don’t get it, I get very frustrated in front of the camera. There’s something that I’m always reaching for. But I recently left that behind. Now, I just go with the process and let the images unfold over time. I don’t know,” Bui shrugs. “Maybe I’m more confident in the imagery of my work.”◼︎

Affinités poreuses continues through 28 October 2023 at McBride Contemporain, 372 Saint Catherine Street West Suite 414.

Cover image: Jill Schweber.

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Fat of the Land

Moishes, Rue du Square-Victoria, 29 June 2023

An entirely new sensation recently came over me.

I won’t say who or how I learned the news, but I discovered last month that someone who had very badly trolled me online — one of the few people who actually made threats, and about whom I filed a number of unanswered reports to Twitter, leading me in no small part to leave that platform entirely — has died. A person who wrote that they would harm me has departed. Dead dead deadski. Gone. Split. Outta here. Afterlife, kids. I wished them dead, and they died.

Only Scorpios and the Germans have a word for this.

Carmina Burana, Orchestre Classique de Montréal, Maison Symphonique 20 June 2023

The OCM closed out its season with a rousing rendition of Carl Orff’s cantata, Carmina Burana, otherwise known as the soundtrack to every action movie between about 1984 and 2010, when it achieved peak cliché status.

A new orchestral work by Maxime Goulet, entitled Fire & Ice, inspired by the devastating Montreal ice storm of 1998 and commissioned by director Taras Kulish, preceded the Orff performance. No shade to ’98, but we’ve already endured an equally wicked ice storm, several heat waves, and ongoing apocalyptic forest fires as if 2023 has been one giant hold-my-beer meme.

War soundtracks are either from a soldier’s perspective or from the sidelines. The front-line fighter wants to hear something that charges him up — like Russia’s favourite, The Prodigy.

Whereas the armchair spectator craves something more emotional and dramatic, like William Ryan Fritch’s heartrending, ambient soundtrack to this slickly produced New York Times documentary.

Russia provides the war, The Times provides the score.

Jim Holyoak, Gargantuans, McBride Contemporain, 25 May – 30 June 2023

On 6 December 1969, a free concert was mounted at the Altamont Speedway outside of Tracy, California. The lineup featured a who’s who of 60s psychedelia including Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, The Grateful Dead, and The Rolling Stones. The event’s organizers billed it as the Woodstock of the West, promising peace, love, and all the dope that anyone could desire.

The security detail, however — the Oakland chapter of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang — was not on the same trip. As night fell, the Altamont concert descended into chaos, resulting in numerous injuries and deaths.

A Hell’s Angels member repeatedly stabbed Stephen Stills in the leg with a bicycle spoke, and the lead singer of the San Francisco band the Ace of Cups, Denise Jewkes, suffered a fractured skull when a bottle was tossed in from the crowd.

Meredith Hunter, a black teenager, took a knife in the back after he charged the stage with a pistol. He succumbed to his injuries.

Hunter’s target was unclear. Was it simply revenge for an earlier skirmish, or did the devil’s sympathizers somehow possess this man in a lime green suit?

Inevitable, 540 St. Laurent Blvd, 26 June 2023

Everything I know about Italian food I learned from either Francis Ford Coppola or Martin Scorsese. I recall an appearance by Scorsese and his mother, Catherine, on an episode of Late Night With David Letterman to promote the film Goodfellas. Mrs. Scorsese had baked a pizza for Letterman’s audience and was cutting it with scissors. Dave remarked that she wasn’t using a knife or a pizza cutter, and she informed him that to scissor was the preferable method.

I immediately noticed that Mr. Arciero used scissors to slice his pizzas, too. This affirmed its legitimacy to me. I’m not Italian; I’m Ukrainian. But Italians and Ukrainians have the same word for tomatoes, which makes us practically comrade paisans. And dare I submit that Italians know better what to do with tomatoes. We use them as sauce for cabbage rolls. Italians mix them with basil and spread them on fermented dough. And damn, it’s delicious.

There isn’t any pretence about Inevitable. No ultrahip font or incandescent bulbs with glowing filaments exposed. Just Italian goodness made by some fellas.

Maison Margan, 370 Place Royale, 27 June 2023

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the hot dog king of Moscow, has increasingly been employing divisive, populist rhetoric in public, saying things like, “The children of the elite smear themselves with creams, showing it on the internet; ordinary people’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces.” 

Though Prigozhin is no ordinary person. He’s a billionaire with a private army that would make David Koresh’s compound look like a carnival in a parking lot. Prigozhin is decidedly a member of the elite.

But he is so ugly. His skin is rough and ruddy. You know what’s decadent? Those teeth. Someone could use a makeover.

Screenshot from a New York Times Opinion Video entitled “A Salute to the Honest(ish) Russian Warlord.”

Prigozhin and madmen like him would rather the elite’s children come in zinc, torn to pieces, too, than, God forbid, ordinary children smear themselves with creams on the internet, even though there’s nothing decadent in the strictest sense of the word about a good cream smearing from time to time.

Rather, self-care resists decay. This is why lipstick was such a coveted commodity after World War II. Cosmetics might have even stimulated the Baby Boom and the period of peaceful Western prosperity that followed.

At the beginning of the Ukrainian invasion, I volunteered at St. Sophie’s Cathedral, helping to organize the immense and generous volume of community contributions to incoming Ukrainians displaced by war. Coats, clothes, boots, books, games, furniture, cups, saucers, dishes, cutlery, soap, shampoo, body cream.

My eyes fell upon a wooden bowlful of toiletries donated by a local luxury hotel. A woman who had come to the church with her two children picked out a tube of body cream from the bowl as if it were a precious gem or an orchid.

This woman was by no means elite. But nor was she ordinary. She was in a church basement in Montreal selecting a donated tube of hotel body cream under extremely extraordinary circumstances.

We are fortunate in this city, despite having to navigate between orange cones and languages, to have nice things. We deserve nice things. Everyone does. Even Yevgeny Prigozhin. Let’s oppose zinc and ordinary children torn to pieces, not body cream.

Grace means beauty amidst brutality. It is not an end, but a means to one.◼︎

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