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A month before graduating from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design this spring, Isabelle Pauwels was afforded a solo-exhibition at Vancouver’s Or Gallery. Following exhibitions by artists such as Mark Lewis, Ron Terada, and Karin Persson, this exhibition is a good sign that director/curator Reid Shier has not only been keeping his eyes on established international artists, but has remained willing to take risks with less seasoned, but equally interesting, local artists.
For her debut exhibition, Pauwels has installed a simple, yet impressive, drop ceiling which reduces the height of the gallery by over half. The installation can be viewed from a number of approaches, each of which forces visitors to alter their usual approach to a gallery space. Looking into the basement-level gallery from the street, the construction of the drop ceiling is curiously, yet clearly, staged by a lighting system—one that is normally used to illuminate the walls and floor of the white gallery space. By obscuring the space below, this system attracts attention and suggests the incongruity of a fully illuminated service bay. After passing through a brightly-lit corridor, the visitor confronts the darkness of Pauwels’ intervention in this underground space by opening the door to the gallery. As one enters the darkness—an act rendered particularly awkward by the lowered ceiling that corresponds with the height of the door frame—time becomes an important aspect of the experience. For it is only after a few minutes, when the eyes have adjusted to the dim light that filters through the gridded ceiling structure, that the subtle play between architecture and people is revealed. One’s attention is drawn slowly away from the ceiling—or artwork—into the social arena, as one is forced to rely on voices and silhouettes to make out the other visitors, who press themselves to the gallery walls for some sense of security. By slowing down the viewer’s movement around the gallery space and by fleetingly redirecting visual attention away from both objects and people towards a relationship between spaces, Pauwels creates a play between blindness and insight. The effect is most apparent on leaving the exhibition and reentering the harshly-lit hallway. Blinded for a third time, the visitor is now forced to readjust their vision to an outside world which for a brief moment in time is strikingly connected to Pauwels’ interrogation of the social structure we call art.
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