“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.”
The world we perceive is shaped before it arrives — by inherited frameworks, cultural conditioning and the accumulated weight of what we have been prepared to see. Van Gool’s research-based practice examines how expectations structure perception across image culture, privilege and inherited modes of looking, using printed image assemblies, video, installation and other media as research tools. Through calibrated disruption, she constructs situations 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.
