This was honest. This was what I didn’t even know I had been waiting for. A response without a stutter. A story retold with no beginnings and no ends.

I may be new to the old, but that does not make things unfamiliar. The triggers were all too familiar. How is this all so familiar? The impossibility of perspective. The internalization of cliche. The childhood play-a-longs with or without a camera. Repetition never reveals the same. I am a sucker for neon rhythm.

I had wondered why they kept the EXIT sign visible. That was a good moment. To share a space through the screen. I have no idea why I know who the Kardashians are. The flaccid saxophone reminds me of hundreds of videos I have never seen. They have somehow taken up an allotment of space in my brain, permeating somewhere in my cortex that I never knew existed. This blew everything out of the water. This was an institutional lobotomy.

I should have gone straight home to write about this. It was unfair to see anything else after. To have conversations with those who didn’t see it. I could not look at any more video screens. There was an emptiness in the experience. To walk up to a screen, to watch it move and flicker, to stand there as if I am taking something in, when really, I should be giving something back.

There is so much to speak of that I cannot say anything. She has rifled through the archive and absorbed it. Dominated it. Someone afterwards had confused Catwoman for a Dominatrix. Or maybe I am missing the conflation? The double play. The double self. The side glance to the camera. I was always aware of the camera. I was always aware of my self.

This is only a first cut? I haven’t even processed the clay and ceramics yet. I just know this was crucial for me. Materiality is key. Singularity in a field of repetition is actually beautiful. I never use this word. I also never use the word “filmic.” It is a word to be used here. This is the extension of the moving image as a form and a history as a presence that is moving forward finally moving rushing galloping forward. Retro is not cool. Neither is suicide. Filmic is the only word to be used here. Not many works can be paired with this word. I am not sure if I have ever been content in using this word. Feminized is another term orbiting all of this. The Western Front has finally been feminized — and things have never looked better.

Isabelle Pauwels, LIKE … /AND, LIKE/YOU KNOW/TOTALLY/ RIGHT. June 8 - 10, 2012 at The Western Front