Working in video, installation, and photography, Isabelle Pauwels explores ideas of history, narrative, and the very act of watching. Pauwels is the first recipient of John and Shari Behnke’s Brink award, a $12,500 grant accompanied by a solo exhibit and purchase of work by the Henry Art Gallery. A Belgian-born, B.C.-based artist, Pauwels graduated from Vancouver’s Emily Carr Institute, and, in 2006, earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pauwels is, yes, an emerging artist on the brink of success, and her current exhibit offers a great first look at an artist little known in Seattle. This exhibit is on view at the Henry Art Gallery through May 9, 2010.
Pauwels' exhibit, Incredibly, Unbelievably/The Complete Ordered Field, is comprised of two films, one of which is shown within a life-size grass hut, as well as a series of manipulated photographs. On entering the Henry’s downstairs gallery, one is struck by the overwhelming grassy scent of the hut, (which has been on view since January 30) housing the film, W.E.S.T.E.R.N.
This piece is composed of contemporary video of the artist’s parents’ home in B.C., interspliced with old Super 8 footage captured by Pauwels’ maternal grandfather during his time as agronomist in what was then the Belgian Congo, from 1947-1960. (The wall text explains this.). There is also contemporary footage shot in Belgium, where the family dispersed the grandparents’ estate. We see the artist’s mother displaying, and explaining, items belonging to her parents, interrupted by images of shirtless dark-skinned laborers working her father’s fields in Congo. We see a sculpture of a black man crouching, set in a comfortable home, and then a clip of a black man, also crouching, in Congo. The audio is occasionally in English, sometimes in Freise——a European language, similar to Dutch, in which the artist and her mother converse. Conversations are interrupted, and sometimes the voices go silent. Bright green screens lettered with white text provide occasional translations, sometimes highlighting significant words or phrases. One of the green screens reads: “The film you have been watching contains content shot by the agricultural agent 90872 in his spare time.”
There is some awkward discussion of race. Pauwels’ mother describes a flat nose on a carved head depicting a Congo native, an object especially prized in her family. The word NOSE flashes on a green screen. This is as close a discussion to race as we will get. Her mother continues, “Can I say that word?” The sound cuts out. We see the word: Neger. And Pauwels’ mother explains, “They say it isn’t correct. It is correct. It’s not the same as…”
More clear depictions of race come with scenes of dark-skinned people working, and light skinned people playing. At a blond child’s birthday party, the cook delivering the cake disappears into the background. The room is dark, and so, in the poor lighting, she appears headless. It’s an innocent image, a family at home with their domestic help, and eerie as well.
The sounds of this video, and the one adjacent to it (which offers a more direct narrative) interrupt and overlap and sometimes repeat each other. Over and over, the films go from silent contemporary images, or voices we can’t always understand, to the jarring slap/flap of a rolling projector. This sound is a historical artifact in itself. Over and over, we see rich jungles from one time, and again and again the green of the artist’s parents’ arbor, closer to present tense. It’s an intense green, spring-like, and the same hue the occasional text is written on.
One of the most beautiful images also repeats from one film to the next: it’s a blurred view of the leafy hedge through a mesh screen. It’s slightly fuzzy, an organic image seen through a scrim of metal. This is nature, clearly manipulated. Most of the contemporary footage is sharp, whereas the archival images are indistinct. Here, we see a suburban image blurred by its place of perspective, inside looking out. It is precisely this remove that creates such a striking pattern.
The hut that houses W.E.S.T.E.R.N. is a replica of those captured in the vintage footage, but this hut has no entrance. It has two windows to lean on to watch the video, or one can choose to sit on the floor, far enough from the screen so the windowsills don’t obstruct the view. It is not a comfortable way to watch, which seems entirely by design. To watch June 30, the second, more plot-driven video, you must simply stand, or sit on the floor. No bench is provided to make this content any easier to ingest. June 30 is the date, in 1960, when Congo’s Independence began, in a revolution against Belgian rule.
“Maybe you already know how you feel about these kinds of images: stucco walls, vinyl siding, white men being carried by black men,” Pauwels said in her talk at the Henry in January. “And if you already know how you feel about that, well, maybe you think you know the story and your relationship to it, and that gives you a certain kind of security, doesn't it, knowing how you feel... But meanwhile, the relationship between representation and—not reality, but ‘how things work’, and what is your participation in that relationship—well, that can be much harder to negotiate, much harder to grasp. When you have different eras of technology like film, digital video meeting each other via an operation of projecting, recapturing and editing, this will confuse your sense of location.” And this is where Pauwels gets to the message in the media. “By location,” she continues, “I don't mean necessarily a geographical location or location in time, but rather your ability to make meaning of a physical or emotional experience, and how that ability in turn locates you in relation to yourself, who you are.” Pauwels is asking us to not be too sure of what we think we know before we see her work, and before we feel it. Part of what she is trying to do with this work, and with the exhibit, with the works spilling over each other from one film to the next, and the scent of the hut taking over the whole gallery space, is to offer a physical experience of a historical time.
The pervading organic scent of the hut is a tangible reminder of the manual labor depicted in the films, and a nod to the fact that Pauwels is two generations descended from the man who managed these lands. We see fine furnishings in her parents’ home, including some African sculptures, and it is impossible not to consider the fact that some of this wealth was gained from the labor of others.
“Now I'd like to talk about something that we do know how to locate: family values. What are they?” Pauwels asks next, again during her talk at the Henry. “Narrative is the key family value. Reproduction, continuity, inheritance, stability; the family reduces the odds, moves towards predictability: so that the parents can have a return on their investment. Family is slow, takes a long time to develop, and perhaps that is why people say the family is in trouble these days…I had the opportunity to capture my family at a dramatic time: the splitting of my grandparent's estate in Belgium. Inheritance happens when owners die, and so the replacement owners can come in and find things to take. As an artist my family is my asset, ripe for editing, re-sequencing, re-placing. Not that my presence behind the camera is necessarily welcome. But they did tolerate me, cause they know me of course, I'm family. But behind the camera, I am out of position, because I am trying to find my position, or a position, a frame, in that most unfamiliar landscape: that of my own family. It's a record of my attempt to capture, and to measure, and to pace out, the dispersal of an estate—in other words objects and stories, once fixed, in a location, but now converted into material for the editing bay.”
Pauwels clearly inherited an interest in capturing images. Her grandfather and her mother were and are photographers. Her grandfather’s photographs of dark-skinned laborers are scanned and enlarged here, exposing the editing marks that Pauwels' grandmother added. On the images of the young, beautiful, shirtless Congolese woman, we see that Pauwels’ grandmother has made the teeth more perfect. This detail is a piece of family lore, and it works to make all three generations complicit in their own story-making.
One of the most striking framed photographic pieces is Immunized arm(s). Ten identical images of one dark-skinned upper arm are lined up like the men (in one vintage clip) with their voting papers. One smooth-skinned arm is scarred by an immunization shot; we see it ten times. This work gives a nod to anonymity, commodity, and to the forced immunizations the Congolese laborers endured at that time. The piece below this one is titled Ten able-bodied adult males, and depicts the blank side of a postcard, again ten times. The two works, hung one atop the other, and their titles, work as a sort of diptych. They are sourced from images the artist scanned from her grandfather’s photo albums, cropped, and replicated.
Pauwels’ presentation of such issue-laden images is nuanced and careful. She tells a story fraught with historical significance—the abrupt end of Belgian colonial rule—within the larger context of race and colonialism. Her family’s history is inextricable from these larger phenomena, and Pauwels shows this in ways that are both subtle and sophisticated. These are family movies we’re watching, with all their low-tech signals of authenticity, and yet they have a bigger story to tell. One of the striking choices Pauwels makes, over and over, during the scenes when her mother is talking about the Congolese objects, is to invert the film. The sculptures of African figures, and the polished coffee root, even her mother, are shown upside down. The artist is distancing herself slightly from these things in her family, and yet, clearly, this is her inheritance: The objects, and the looking at them, both, she knows intimately. (And the talking around the issue, as well.) And yet, we, the audience, are allowed in. The narrative told by the camera is more direct than that told by the dialogue, if we are willing to sit still, and allow the messy, loud, topsy-turvy story to unwind.
The political content in this exhibit is charged—her grandfather’s spare, text-only narrative of the family fleeing the revolution is a striking, harrowing, flashcard sequence of history—but it seems the work is more concerned with the looking, the repeat images, and the very nature of capturing history, and passing it down. The flickering open and shut of thick white blinds in Pauwels' parents’ house is a look at a lens itself. Pauwels isn’t willing to take the story apart and give us one neat answer to all the issues she raises, but she is willing to share them with us, and invite us into a complex, physical narrative with her family at its center.
Adriana Grant is a freelance art writer. Her work has appeared in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Weekly, as well as in Arcade, art ltd., City Arts, Public Art Review, and Sunset magazines.
Image: W.E.S.T.E.R.N., video still, 2010. Courtesy of the artist and Catriona Jeffries Gallery, Vancouver.
