At Gallery 881, Vapes & Butts looks at tobacco smoking through an artist’s lens
Michelle Leone Huisman used a 19th-century printing technique to create her vivid images of the things that smokers discard
Michelle Leone Huisman’s Vape No. 5 (left) and Butt No. 3—Ode to Penn
Vapes & Butts is at Gallery 881 from May 6 to June 6
ACCORDING TO A recent Globe and Mail article, Vancouverites toss over 450,000 cigarette butts every day. As for vape pods—who knows? It’s easy to ignore all that toxic litter; people are good at filtering out such details (pun intended). But it tells a story.
The long history of tobacco addiction and human folly, but also the emotional and psychological comforts we seek, and the less defensible tale of its exploitation and the demonic targeting of youth by market forces—it’s all there in those half-million-plus fibre filters and spent plastic devices gathering in our storm drains.
Michelle Leone Huisman
Somehow, with her new show Vapes & Butts, renowned Vancouver-based photographer Michelle Leone Huisman has made something beautiful and inspiring from this mess while crystallizing the multiple narratives at work behind tobacco addiction. As with previous exhibitions, like her acclaimed Global Pandemic series in 2022, it came from some primordial impulse Huisman can’t quite name.
“I can’t tell you why,” she laughs, in a call to Stir. “I had started collecting vapes cause they were pretty! They just stand out, they pop out, and that’s kinda the point. They’re bright and colourful.” After a beat, she adds: “And kid friendly.”
The 22-piece series Vapes & Butts is exceedingly colourful—psychedelic, almost—rendering crushed darts and corroded pods into ultra-vivid objects of fascination through the painstaking platinum-palladium printing technique, which dates back to the 19th century. It was a two-year project for Huisman, including the months she spent just collecting garbage, much of it from the grounds of a nearby high school. Each image required five days to produce.
On its surface, Vapes & Butts pits the intensity of the process against the disposability of the subject, but there’s more going on here. It’s also a callback to Irving Penn’s classic series Cigarettes, which is noted for reviving the palladium technique while also signalling Penn’s crossover from commercial to fine artist. Huisman’s innovation is the addition of blazing colour through layers of gum bichromate.
“The project actually began more personally,” Huisman explains, “thinking about my grandparents and great-grandfather, his roll-your-own Players, and the quiet rituals around it. Those small, repeated gestures stayed with me. Around the same time, I found myself returning to Penn’s Cigarettes series, and the work began to open up from there.”
Significantly, Penn’s series dates to March 1972—the year of Huisman’s birth. She produced Vapes & Butts in the same month, 52 years later. And she found herself in the peculiar state that visits an artist only occasionally.
“It might sound strange but it felt like Irving Penn was in the room with me,” she says, a little nervously. “It was weird. It was one of those moments, and I have chills right now thinking about it, but you get these ‘a-ha’ moments and it’s like, ‘This is it! This is what I want out of the project!’ And it just happens.
“I don’t want people to think I’m completely out there,” Huisman continues, with a shy laugh, “but that’s what happened and that’s how it happened. And I do think it’s important for artists to go with their instincts. ‘This is what I’m trying to say and this is how I’m trying to portray it.’”
Michelle Leone Huisman’s Butt No. 23—Ode to Penn
His personal aversion to smoking lent a moralistic subtext to Penn’s Cigarettes. Huisman has pledged to donate a portion of her sales to the Canadian Cancer Society, but Vapes & Butts reflects a more fractal and tolerant POV.
“I keep coming back to how normalized smoking once was,” Huisman says. “Especially in creative circles. When I was at Toronto Metropolitan University in the ’90s, nearly everyone in the photo program smoked. It was just part of the culture.”
The PR for Vapes & Butts mentions consumption and ritual, with the latter being acknowledged by the artist in a way that Penn’s series eludes. If tobacco companies remain a worthy target of scorn, half a century of culture flux has bestowed a certain sympathy on the smoker, a creature who has been relentlessly shamed and hounded out of public spaces in recent years. Vaping still carries the stigma. Huisman has never indulged, but she nonetheless admits to a certain envy for family and friends who did.
“My mum. She wasn’t a heavy smoker but that was her break. I never took a break! I would go to the smoking pit with my friends ’cause I wanted to hang out with them. ‘I’m taking the break as well!’ And to me, that’s a good memory beyond the connotation that it’s so unhealthy.
“Not to mention,” she adds, “back then there were places to put your cigarette butts.” 
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