Isabelle Pauwels

I first became aware of the Canadian Artist Isabelle Pauwels’ work in 2014, after being contacted by a friend about providing vocal talent for a visiting artist. A week later I was in a recording studio at R.P.I.’s Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center, one of a dozen men standing in a circle, each in front of a mic, feigning orgasm in unison. After several days of voice work and several months of waiting, I got to witness the finished project: an immersive multimedia performance titled ,OOO,. Through a combination of video, multichannel audio, and several open stage sets, I navigated my way through the braided stories of a dominatrix, Bijou Steel (based on the artist’s sister), her clients, and the paper industry, real estate market, and politics of a postindustrial city in Northwestern Canada, called New Westminster, British Columbia.

In the years since the initial installation, ,OOO, has been adapted as both a radio play for the CBC and a long-form video, which Pauwels is quick to state “is NOT documentation of the multimedia event.” Having attended, listened, and watched all three formats of this piece, the project is well worth watching as video art. If you want documentation of the original event, Pauwels’ site offers a number of stills and some video documentation of the installation itself.

There is magnificent tension and little release in Pauwels work, and this induces a palpable restriction that artists working with exponentially greater budgets have been unable to produce in me. Watching her videos could metaphorically describe gripping a rose until your hand is full of thorns and then realizing there was never a flower. She acknowledges this tension in her brief notes on the piece:

I could say the story explores the psychological impact of commercial relations (are there any other?) between people. But I don’t like explanations, especially my own.  Maybe the story is just tease and denial. Tease: you can’t be the same at the end as you were at the beginning.

In 2018 Pauwel’s was invited back to EMPAC and produced If It Bleeds, a fascinating video that explores the intersections of media and mixed martial arts, a video which “can’t- or won’t- tell the difference between real and fake fighting.” Currently, there are only six short clips of this piece available on Pauwels’ site, all well worth repeated viewing.

Pauwel’s website offers most of her work for free viewing. W.E.S.T.E.R.N. is a grainy meditation on colonialism and the coffee trade. Also available is June 30th, a film loop that interrogates her families ties to colonialism utilizing camcorder footage of her grandparents’ home and work in the Belgian Congo, and B&E, a short film about a trip to her grandparents’ farm in rural Belgium. In these films, Pauwels’ work takes on the feel of a gauzily impressionistic Ross McElwee.

One the earliest and most fascinating works on her site is B—-+—-+—-+—-E, in which the artist attempts to “re-present classic porn as structuralist film” by screening films in a theater in which exterior doors swing open, the projector breaks, and water leaks into the theater.   

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Adam Tedesco is a founding editor of REALITY BEACH, a journal of new poetics. His video work has been screened at MoMA PS1, among other venues. His poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, jubilat, Posit, Conduit and elsewhere. He is the author of several chapbooks, most recently Misrule (Ursus Americanus, 2019). His first full-length poetry collection, Mary Oliver, was published by Lithic Press in February.