Isabelle Pauwels’s sequence of images hovers between fantasy, absurdism, and documentary. Sourced from digital photographs, scans of family archives, and frame-grabs from the artist’s past video productions, the images depict common cultural artifacts. These are capped by mirroring analogue-video colour bars superimposed with text clipped from digital HD-video colour bars. Removed from their original contexts, further processed, and combined with texts that function as visual shapes as well as language, the images form an open-ended narrative. While evoking advertisements through the pairing of image and text, the resulting collages refrain from directing us to feel or react in a certain way. Their meanings shift according to how we combine and prioritize them in relation to the rest of the sequence. Left to right, right to left, these two but not the others—the story can change every time.

Presented by Presentation House Gallery in partnership with Capture Photography Festival and the Canada Line Public Art Program—inTransitBC. Capture gratefully acknowledges the support of the British Columbia Arts Council.