ISABELLE PAUWELS
W.E.S.T.E.R.N, 2010
HDV projection
33:45
RIVERSIDE PARK
The collection of works in Luminocity 2020 presents a portal to complex and often dark histories that inform present contexts. Isabelle Pauwels’ work reveals the challenges of coming to terms with one’s own history. In W.E.S.T.E.R.N, 2010, Pauwels juxtaposes film footage of her parents' home in Richmond with home movies shot in her grandfather's home in the Belgian Congo. Still moments and text act as objects of evidence that simultaneously complicate and provide fragmentary disruption towards an understanding of the videos.
W.E.S.T.E.R.N aims to create space for the viewer to negotiate colonial histories. Although Pauwels makes clear, “This is not a documentary about colonialism. It's a portrait of my mother, whose life has been structured by interruption, repetition and transition.” With Pauwels’ mother at the centre of the narrative, the video follows the artist’s eye around her family home. This intimate exploration is sharply interrupted by 8mm home movies taken by her grandfather in the then Belgian Congo where he worked as an agronomist in the 1950s. The home movies reveal disturbing power relations and the exploitation of Africans on their land that is implicated within this time and context.
Through this deliberate disruption Pauwels' work resists clear narrative structures; her work interrogates forms of storytelling and how they shape moral and emotional experiences. Pauwels explains that in W.E.S.T.E.R.N “matter-of-fact, pseudo-bureaucratic intertitles pretend to organize the footage. The editing style makes it impossible for you to hang on to a line of thought for very long. Do you even know what you’re looking at? There’s no soothing British (or Belgian) Narrator helping you out.”
Isabelle Pauwels received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design , Vancouver, BC, in 2001, and a Masters in Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, in 2006. In 2009 she was the inaugural winner of the Brink Award, granted to an early-career artist working in Washington, Oregon or British Columbia. In 2013 she was a finalist for the Sobey Award. Recently, Pauwels has exhibited at Unit 17 Gallery in Vancouver, BC, and at the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Montréal, Québec.
Isabelle Pauwels
W.E.S.T.E.R.N, 2010
HDV projection
courtesy of the Artist
Photos: Frank Luca