Isabelle Pauwels
If It Bleeds

From May 14 to July 3, 2021

Although the narrative of If it Bleeds revolves around a group of adversaries confronting one another, Pauwels focuses on the spectacle that surrounds mixed martial arts events. By foregrounding the fight announcement, promotional tours, post-fight press conference, and disciplinary hearings, she underscores the irony of a world that creates its own rhetoric as a way to validate itself and state its own truth. In essence, the work explores the grotesque and sublime nature of human interactions. This finds some resonance in contemporary culture where authenticity is born out of and prevails in artifice.

Even though the actors embody their characters convincingly, the editing structure forces them to interfere in each other’s scenes and stand in for one another in a quick succession that defies all syntactic logic and shatters the referential function of language. The same can be said for the unrealistic and fragmentary, yet generic sets. In this derision, words merely point to the dysfunction, the disappearance of objects, sets, and bodies, and the hollowness of any attempt to represent the world.

Pauwels says about her practice that it explores our shared investment in the world as a compilation of representations, narrative conventions, and clichés. We engage with this world as both spectators and as performers, often simultaneously.

At Dazibao’s invitation, Isabelle Pauwels produced a substantially revised version of If it Bleeds that further pushes its limits and, in some ways, transposes, even exacerbates, the original video’s structure and motifs within the physical space of the gallery.

If it Bleeds (2018/2021) is a new version of the original single channel video (4K, 44 minutes) produced in 2018 and commissioned by EMPAC-RPI (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York), funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council.

Isabelle Pauwels is currently based in Montréal. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (Vancouver) in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. In 2009 she was the inaugural winner of the Brink Award, granted to an early-career artist working in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia. In 2013 she was a finalist for the Sobey Award. Recently her work has been exhibited at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Unit 17 Gallery, Vancouver, and at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, New York.