“We keep trying to close narrative and perceptual loops, and reality becomes the decor to that. We convince ourselves it’s reality, but it’s usually our own story, pushed as fact. Personally and collectively, the most privileged story becomes the real one.”
Van Gool’s practice examines how inherited modes of looking — shaped by image culture, privilege and compounded experience — determine what coheres as real, what becomes legible as serious, and what gets filed elsewhere. The operating logic is calibrated disruption: she constructs configurations of images and image environments in which the viewer’s anticipatory system is activated and then withheld from resolution, making the mechanism of expectation briefly perceptible as mechanism rather than nature. The practice is discovery-led, working with culturally laden material drawn from Western image traditions — bodies and landscapes, the sexually available and the demure, the monumental and the archival — territories where the constructed most insistently presents itself as given.
