Isabelle Pauwels is a prominent member of a younger generation of Vancouver artists coming to international attention. Her conceptually based practice frequently tests the limits of existing formal structures and gauges the stakes of various social transactions enclosed in these formats. In past works, Pauwels has engaged the conditions of video, architecture, typographical conventions, proprietary symbols and building codes in order to jar the viewer’s customary reception of these — and point to their additional performative implications.
In this exhibition, Isabelle Pauwels divides, reformats, and interleaves several existing narrative structures throughout the space of the gallery. A reverse chronology of popular entertainment that begins with reality television, spans pre-commercial license era television of the 1920s and ’30s, and ends with theatre, will converge in the form of Pauwels’ More or Less Square: A Book in Three Parts. Pauwels will construct the book itself as the product of an assembly line in the gallery. The exhibition’s additional sound and video components will be distributed throughout the installation and presented on a monitor, a microphone stand, and as a large video projection. These devices are plotted deliberately within the gallery to question what geographical, occupational and primetime economies are at stake in producing assembly line narratives.
