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Category: Artworks
Fringe
2007 / Vancouver, BC / Photograph
2007 / Plan Large, Quartier Éphémère, Montreal, PQ / Billboard
As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself. Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it. So it is a very simple scenario: she will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. She will turn her back on the atrocities inflicted upon her body and find resilience in the future. The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear.
Rebecca Belmore, in conversation with Kathleen Ritter, Vancouver Art Gallery, April 19, 2008
Photo credit: Henri Robideau, Guy L’Heureux / Quartier Éphémère (billboard installation)
2007 / Plan Large, Quartier Éphémère, Montreal, PQ / Billboard
As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself. Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it. So it is a very simple scenario: she will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. She will turn her back on the atrocities inflicted upon her body and find resilience in the future. The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear.
Rebecca Belmore, in conversation with Kathleen Ritter, Vancouver Art Gallery, April 19, 2008
Photo credit: Henri Robideau, Guy L’Heureux / Quartier Éphémère (billboard installation)
Tower, tarpaulin
2018 / Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, ON / Sculpture
Tower, a pillar of shopping carts stacked high around a clay column, looms over another piece, tarpaulin, a grimy blanket-sized swatch draped over a ghostly human form. There’s an implicit nod, I think, to the naive purity of high Modernism – you can’t look at a stack of repeating forms (nor make one) without thinking of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. But Belmore fastens it to the cold, hard ground: Shopping carts, she told me, are essential tools for the homeless, whose population has exploded amid skyrocketing housing costs during her time in Vancouver; and tarps are maybe their most important means of survival.
Murray White, Facing the Monumental, Galleries West, August 2018
Photo credit: Art Gallery of Ontario
Tower, a pillar of shopping carts stacked high around a clay column, looms over another piece, tarpaulin, a grimy blanket-sized swatch draped over a ghostly human form. There’s an implicit nod, I think, to the naive purity of high Modernism – you can’t look at a stack of repeating forms (nor make one) without thinking of Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column. But Belmore fastens it to the cold, hard ground: Shopping carts, she told me, are essential tools for the homeless, whose population has exploded amid skyrocketing housing costs during her time in Vancouver; and tarps are maybe their most important means of survival.
Murray White, Facing the Monumental, Galleries West, August 2018
Photo credit: Art Gallery of Ontario
Apparition
2013 / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver, BC / Video installation
Apparition is an artwork that reflects my understanding of the loss of our language. More, it is an illustration of the potential for its disappearance. I do not speak Anishinaabemowin even though I grew up within it and around it. Sadly, I am well aware of the devastating effects of the residential school system, particularly the deliberate role it played in the silencing of our languages. For this reason Apparition is an image of myself, a silent portrait of this loss. – Rebecca Belmore
Video credit: Leif Norman
Photo credit: Michael R. Barrick / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
Apparition is an artwork that reflects my understanding of the loss of our language. More, it is an illustration of the potential for its disappearance. I do not speak Anishinaabemowin even though I grew up within it and around it. Sadly, I am well aware of the devastating effects of the residential school system, particularly the deliberate role it played in the silencing of our languages. For this reason Apparition is an image of myself, a silent portrait of this loss. – Rebecca Belmore
Video credit: Leif Norman
Photo credit: Michael R. Barrick / Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery
black cloud
2001 / Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto, Mississauga, ON / Sculpture
The dark cloud may be read as an ominous sign over Canadian territories. Spiked with nails, the charred wood may be staked but it’s also an ambiguous new tool. Showing evidence of persistent and intensive labour, it is as much a sculpture as a representation of history and the suggestion of a weapon. It represents symbolically what sculpture can be or what still needs to be done: intense repetition, exhausting exertion and inestimable duration.
Barbara Fischer, Rebecca Belmore: 33 Pieces, 2001
Photo credit: Paul Litherland / Agnes Etherington Art Centre
The dark cloud may be read as an ominous sign over Canadian territories. Spiked with nails, the charred wood may be staked but it’s also an ambiguous new tool. Showing evidence of persistent and intensive labour, it is as much a sculpture as a representation of history and the suggestion of a weapon. It represents symbolically what sculpture can be or what still needs to be done: intense repetition, exhausting exertion and inestimable duration.
Barbara Fischer, Rebecca Belmore: 33 Pieces, 2001
Photo credit: Paul Litherland / Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Mister Luna
2001 / Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto, Mississauga, ON / Sculpture
Mounted way up in a circle of lights, shiny yellow shoes stand for the artist whose name implies the light that radiates from the moon. I have rarely found the effect of lights as hopeful and beautiful as they are in this place, amongst the histories and thoughts that interlock in Rebecca Belmore’s installation.
Barbara Fischer, Rebecca Belmore: 33 Pieces, 2001
Photo credit: Michael Beynon / Blackwood Gallery, Paul Litherland / Agnes Etherington Art Centre
Mounted way up in a circle of lights, shiny yellow shoes stand for the artist whose name implies the light that radiates from the moon. I have rarely found the effect of lights as hopeful and beautiful as they are in this place, amongst the histories and thoughts that interlock in Rebecca Belmore’s installation.
Barbara Fischer, Rebecca Belmore: 33 Pieces, 2001
Photo credit: Michael Beynon / Blackwood Gallery, Paul Litherland / Agnes Etherington Art Centre
1181
2014 / Justina M. Barnicke Gallery, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON / Performance / Sculpture
As a performance artist, Belmore possesses an unremitting control over her audience, a surprising feat given the largely improvisational, unscripted nature of her work. Throughout One thousand One hundred & eighty One, her approach was measured, her demeanour implacable. Over the course of the day, she hammered 1,181 nails into a tree stump, each nail representing one of the murdered and missing Indigenous women. Dressed in a construction vest, she worked methodically in front of the Hart House building, hammering slowly and consistently. The piece began to crescendo in the early evening: after placing the final nail, Belmore began to shout out, in an agonized but clear voice, the number. She repeated it over and over, until it began to take on some of the weight it deserves.
With her audience largely in tears, the effect was elegiac, but defiant.
Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, Top 3 of 2014: Time Travels, Canadian Art, December 2014
Photo credit: Scott Benesiinaabandan
As a performance artist, Belmore possesses an unremitting control over her audience, a surprising feat given the largely improvisational, unscripted nature of her work. Throughout One thousand One hundred & eighty One, her approach was measured, her demeanour implacable. Over the course of the day, she hammered 1,181 nails into a tree stump, each nail representing one of the murdered and missing Indigenous women. Dressed in a construction vest, she worked methodically in front of the Hart House building, hammering slowly and consistently. The piece began to crescendo in the early evening: after placing the final nail, Belmore began to shout out, in an agonized but clear voice, the number. She repeated it over and over, until it began to take on some of the weight it deserves.
With her audience largely in tears, the effect was elegiac, but defiant.
Caoimhe Morgan-Feir, Top 3 of 2014: Time Travels, Canadian Art, December 2014
Photo credit: Scott Benesiinaabandan
Perimeter
nindinawemaganidog (all of my relations)
The Blanket
2011 / Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, MB / Video
Rebecca Belmore’s 4½-minute video called The Blanket shows a dark-haired woman wrapping and unwrapping herself in a red and black Hudson’s Bay point blanket while she moves about a snow-covered Manitoba landscape. The video is not without a sense of anger (the blanket has a poisonous history in relations between white and native Canadians), but The Blanket is also lyric, elegant and sensuous, qualities it shares with the best work in Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years.
Robert Enright, New Aboriginal art show tells stories of adaptation and transformation, The Globe and Mail, February 7, 2011
Video credit: Noam Gonick
Rebecca Belmore’s 4½-minute video called The Blanket shows a dark-haired woman wrapping and unwrapping herself in a red and black Hudson’s Bay point blanket while she moves about a snow-covered Manitoba landscape. The video is not without a sense of anger (the blanket has a poisonous history in relations between white and native Canadians), but The Blanket is also lyric, elegant and sensuous, qualities it shares with the best work in Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years.
Robert Enright, New Aboriginal art show tells stories of adaptation and transformation, The Globe and Mail, February 7, 2011
Video credit: Noam Gonick