VISUAL ARTS
Isabelle Pauwels
Video artist
They call them starving artists for a reason. “I’ve been focused for years on my practice, but I’ve done little for my career,” Isabelle Pauwels wrote in an email. Since 2001, the installation artist has been a fixture in the Vancouver, BC, art scene, occasionally branching out with solo shows in Ontario. Her smart, edgy video projections deconstruct reality TV and take on social issues such as gentrification. But despite getting her MFA in Chicago, she’s never had a solo exhibition in the U.S.—until now. Seems she made one smart career move in the last year: She applied for Henry Art Gallery’s new Brink Award.
The prize, the brainchild of art enthusiasts John and Shari Behnke, gives a big boost ($12,500) and solo show to one regional up-and-comer. Pauwels’s work hit all the benchmarks the selection committee sought: Creative? Check. Innovative? Check. On the brink of being something big? You bet.
Pauwels emerged as the clear winner last April from a pool of 57 submissions; for her Seattle debut, she plans two new videos and a series of photo scans. The video W.E.S.T.E.R.N. juxtaposes images of rural colonial Congo with modern North American suburbia in scenes of labor and leisure shot by Pauwels and her grandfather, a state agronomist in 1950s Belgian Congo. The images tell a capitalist narrative about “the creation of moral hierarchies,” Pauwels said. June 30 explores video without a traditional narrative—think reality TV—and how strategic editing can confuse an audience’s interpretation.
The Henry hopes Seattle audiences react well to Pauwels’s work, encouraging her to show again in our corner of the Pacific Northwest. After all, one goal of the Brink Award is to underscore the essential contributions that regional artists make to our cultural landscape. Pauwels, meanwhile, hopes to “take viewers for a ride, move them between head and gut, between what they know and what they feel.”
We’re already buckled up. —CW
The Brink: Isabelle Pauwels, through May 5, Henry Art Gallery, 206-543-2280; henryart.org
Published: February 2010
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