Mike Bouchet: Bait and Tackle

Galería Fermay is pleased to present “Bait and Tackle”, a solo exhibition by Frankfurt an Main-based American artist Mike Bouchet (1970, Castro Valley, California). 

Mike Bouchet’s artistic career spans for over three decades starting in the mid-nineties when the artist graduated from UCLA in Los Angeles. After living in New York for a few years, by 2004 he had already established himself in the city of Frankfurt where he currently lives and works. 

Mike Bouchet’s body of work is the result of a research-based artistic practice that primarily focuses on the intricate and ever evolving relation between society —epitomised in the individual self— and the wider socioeconomic structures. Without being openly political, his work tackles issues of labour, exploitation, commerce and overconsumption, but he does so not by directly pointing at them, but rather, he develops conceptual strategies that poignantly signal the inner functioning of materialist capitalism while also borrowing elements from the fields of visual culture, advertisement and the food industry, amongst others. More specifically, Bouchet’s work delves in to, or better, recurrently short-circuits the notion of the American Way, understood here not only as the particular consumerist society emerged after Second World War in the US but also, and more importantly, the subsequent widespread assimilation of the core economic, moral and emotional thesis of American capitalism. 

By decontextualising and misappropriating iconic imagery, Mike Bouchet takes to his advantage our common understanding of things in order to create artworks that highlight the psychological load we all inadvertently carry on as well as the affective nature of a biased system that perpetuates desire in a never-ending quest of individual fulfillment. To do so, the artist turns to easily recognizable quotidian products such as cola, hamburgers or Hollywood films elevating them to the status of the sign, as understood by French sociologist Roland Barthes. It is here where the artist operates bringing forth the social, cultural and subjective connotations of such psycho-constructs to hijack our emotional and cognitive automatic responses. Very succinctly, the strategy consists on isolating and intervening the sign thereof suspending meaning. Such gestures usually result in viewers feeling a sense of estrangement and displacement —the uncanny kicks in when the resulting image, or experience, does not correspond with the internalized mental idea resulting very often in a certain degree of discomfort. Mike Bouchet’s conceptual stand also relies on a unapologetic use of irony as well as the absurd and the grotesque that only helps but increasing the intensity of the aforementioned reactions.