Van Gool’s practice works with the mechanism of the gaze. Perception operates like a highway toward a predetermined destination: smooth, automatic, oriented. Her work intervenes in that automatism: it throws up roadblocks, forces detours, makes the viewer take exits they did not choose to take. In the gap that opens, the mechanism that was moving fluently toward resolution becomes visible as a mechanism.
As long as perception, or the gaze, operates on autopilot, it passes for reality. The gaze doesn’t announce itself as a gaze; it presents its destination and the road to it as simply what is there. What is culturally constructed, historically loaded, selectively organized reads as neutral, as given, as fact. Making the mechanism visible exposes the gaze for what it is: a construction.
Van Gool holds a dual formation in image-making and in the historical, political and economic conditions of art and images. Formed within a Western image culture, she examines the gazes it produces: who looks, who is looked at, what that looking produces, whose reality gets to count. Her position is one from within: as a woman, as an artist, as a mother. She works across printed image assemblies, installation, video and online contexts. Her current research projects each approach the same question from a different angle: how does the gaze produce reality, and under what conditions can that mechanism be exposed?
