Zoë Pawlak: Profession of Hurt
by Charo Neville

I am immediately skeptical of artists who choose to address the Downtown Eastside missing and murdered women in their work, especially through such illusionist means as painting and photography. What is their interest in the subject? How does representing this subject through a painting benefit our understanding of such horrific and unimaginable events? Is Zoë Pawlak, a young, White Rock artist, contributing any new insights or ways of understanding, or is she simply adding to the proliferation of images? I think Pawlak's installation called 27 Portraits effectively achieves an intervention into the mass media proliferation. She draws from a typical newspaper article about the missing women, with the small police mug shots we have all now become familiar with surrounding a much larger image of accused serial killer Robert Pickton and the accompanying article in the centre of the page. Using muted colours and bold brush strokes, Pawlak offers us 27 portraits of the women without the glorification of the man who has now come to overshadow their individual lives and humanity. Through the startlingly empty space on the wall, surrounded by these portraits, Pawlak has chosen to take control over the presentation of this information by suggesting a lack, something overtly missing from the media's narrative. Unfortunately, Pawlak's abstract representations of the women leave you wanting - she does not capture a sense of their individuality, but rather perpetuates their identity as an amorphous group of "missing women". In Pawlak's series of abstract landscape paintings throughout the rest of the gallery, entitled Farm Scenes, she also attempts to confront the mass media's sensationalized version of the subject by presenting beautiful depictions of Pickton's farm, a place now imbued with horror.

The viewer experiences a double take, realizing that these fields of colour and bold shapes are actually depictions of a brutal crime scene. While the landscapes encourage you to think about the ways in which we attach strong emotion to places, and about the role the media plays in shaping these perceptions, Pawlak's project seems to contradict itself. How does anesthetizing this site help us contend with the reality of all the social, racial and economic factors that are associated with it? Pawlak is most successful in dealing with this subject through her wall painting, entitled Mud Covers Over a Multitude of Sins, in which she has superimposed a map of the Pickton farm over a map of the Downtown Eastside. Through this simple metaphor, the artist gets at all the social implications of the murders of women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and how deeply these events have registered in a community that is
at once vibrant and profoundly suffering.

As I took in this body of artwork by a young White Rock artist, not only was there a steady flow of people from all walks of life passing through the gallery, but a glaring media presence. I couldn't help myself from engaging with a reporter from the Toronto Star (cameras and lenses strung over his neck) who was insistently trying to take a photograph of Zoë Pawlak's paintings with the gallery sitter posed in front. For obvious reasons, she did not feel comfortable doing this. We both explained to the eager reporter that he would need permission from the artist to use any photographs of the exhibition and, moreover, that it is important to be sensitive to the use of cameras in the neighbourhood. At that moment, someone peeked their head in the gallery door to announce that CBC Television was on its way down the street with their cameras. In this frenzy, the work on the walls seemed to truly reflect the hyper-reality surrounding the gallery.

Charo Neville is an independent curator and Curatorial Assistant at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

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