Rebecca Belmore opens the door of her Main Street studio to reveal a small space resembling an auto salvage yard. A mountain of taillight assemblies, arresting in their redness, glinting with chrome detailing, fill half the room, making a weirdly alien impact.
“I don’t really have a studio practice,” she confesses, gesturing around. “This is new for me. I’m more of a walking around observing, thinking, noticing what’s going on around me person.” The taillights wait to become part of a sculpture project she hopes will find a site “out on the land.”
A week earlier, she had been handed a $100,000 cheque as winner of the 2024 Audain Prize for the Visual Arts. It is the latest in a fistful of major awards and honours that have punctuated more than three decades of multidisciplinary artmaking. People at the Audain event heard that she is celebrated for “works that astonish with their beauty and rigour, touch deeply with their passion and intelligence, and always move us with their great courage.” She responded simply: “We who work in the fields of art believe in its greatness.”
Belmore’s vision is rooted equally in her Anishinaabe heritage and her contemporary experience.
Notice that unexpected plural. The 64-year-old is extraordinarily skilled at twisting a simple image so that it intrigues freshly and resonates more widely. This day, she muses on Vincent van Gogh painting in the fields and the idea of art as work and artists each working in their own field.
Belmore’s vision is rooted equally in her Anishinaabe heritage and her contemporary experience. What she makes is informed by a deep, natural wisdom about our relationship to the world, and she unapologetically challenges our complacency about how we got into our current state. The question she most hates to be asked: “What’s your message?” She laughs in frustration and mock shouts her reply: “Wake up!”
This is someone you warm to immediately. There is toughness of mind but not hardness of heart. Her artistic vision may be focused through a prism of Indigenous self, but it refracts into a broad spectrum of fundamental human concerns. Harm and hurt, certainly. History haunts her works. But so do hope and unbreakable determination. Hers is the gift of finding beauty in the difficult places.
Consider Fringe (2007), a lightbox transparency of her sister Florene, reclining nude, back to the viewer. The figure—narrow feet, finely moulded shoulder blades, the exquisite vulnerability of bare flesh—suggests a classic pose from the western art world’s canon. Then the visual dissonance hits like a sucker punch: an ugly diagonal slash runs from right shoulder to left hip, thickly stitched, raised and ropy. What appear to be rivulets of blood dripping from the gash are actually thin strings of red beading. The beautiful and the difficult inextricably united.
Fringe, 2007. Photograph. Photo by Henri Robideau.
It is a shocking image in the North American context. But as a visual poem, it does not dictate one lockstep reading. Whoever we are, male, female, settler, Indigenous, or none of the above, we look at that body and are stirred, each in turn, according to our own inclinations, understandings, and experiences of the world.
As a child, growing up in Upsala and Thunder Bay, she spent idyllic summers with her grandparents and extended family at Sioux Lookout, a beautiful river-and-lake-rich area of Ontario’s boreal forest. “It was everyday practical living really, just having a large family and recycling materials, repurposing, so as we outgrew clothing and as clothing began wearing out, they would become blankets. I probably noticed that as a child without really knowing I was noticing. It just became part of my way of seeing material and how you can make something new out of something that was no longer of use.”
Her eye for the possibilities within everyday materials developed during her time in the experimental program at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto in the mid-1980s. “What was great about it was that it opened my mind, and I realized that art can be many things, that it can take many shapes and forms. And I met so many people from different parts of the world, the foreign students, and I experienced going to foreign films at the movie theatre, and it really did open my eyes to how diverse art is and that it really can be anything. I think that’s the most valuable thing I learned in art school.”
Back in Thunder Bay in the late 1980s, trying to discover “how to become an artist,” she continued to experiment with performance works using the material closest to hand—her own female Anishinaabe body. “For me, it made sense to use performance because I was the work. I had control over my body, and I had this autonomous kind of space I could control.” She created a rowdy persona named High-Tech Teepee Trauma Mama, a wild mix of party girl and Indigenous stereotypes that allowed Belmore to fiercely satirize current issues that—she says with dry understatement and a conspiratorial smile—“maybe irritated her.”
“I think testing the work out on my own community was a good way of understanding how it can function and actually be effective. They know nothing about contemporary art, they don’t even know what performance art is, and it didn’t matter what it was called. Just as long as you’re there looking at me, I’m doing something, and through that experience and how you experience it is really what creates the conversation.”
The conversation went international in 1991 when she was invited to the fourth Havana Biennial in Cuba. Its theme was “The Challenge of Colonisation.” Belmore’s response, Creation or Death: We Will Win, was a powerful metaphor of intense physicality about the Indigenous struggle to reclaim territories and culture. Belmore, mouth gagged, wrists tied, ankles bound, frantically trying to move a pile of earth, handful by handful, losing much, in a crabwise climb up the long central staircase of the Castillo de la Real Fuerza toward open sky. Her presence at the event carried its own unspoken commentary: the curatorial premise was to feature artists from “third world and developing countries. I was there from Canada.” In retrospect, she says, “being there was a very important learning experience for me.” Certainly her confidence in exploring different forms grew.
By the time of the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she was the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada, she was also working in video and installation. Fountain, a two-and-a-half-minute video shot in Vancouver and projected onto falling water, shows a log-strewn landscape that bursts into flames while Belmore, inundated to her waist, struggles against sea surge to fill a battered tin pail and then heave its contents toward the camera. What pours down the lens, obliterating the scene, is blood. It was a toss-up, back when I first saw it, whether you’d interpret it as a creation metaphor—fire plus water equals the lifeblood—or apocalyptic warning. Today it hits me as a pretty stark message to “wake up.”
Her 2011 work Mixed Blessing features a large black hoodie stencilled with an intersecting cross of letters spelling out Fuckin Artist/Fuckin Indian. “That was a declaration, a way of asserting this idea that artists are an integral part of a society and have a role to play within the well-being of that community. The world can forget that we are important, that we have a contribution to make to enrich the lives of our communities.”
Mixed Blessing, 2011. Sculpture. Photo by Toni Hafkenscheid.
What kind of contribution? For Belmore it might come down to something as simple as human understanding. “It seems like we’re bent on destroying each other. So it becomes difficult to believe in how creative we are and how we can actually create a better world. Art has a place in that because that’s how we articulate who we are at this very time and this moment.”
Not that that is ever easy. “You think it should be easier, and we should all be more open. But I feel sometimes it’s like the opposite is happening, which is worrisome for me.”
She points to the ongoing struggle to get a new Vancouver art gallery off the ground as an example of the difficulty art has in making headway. “I think there’s resistance maybe that is out there—where people don’t embrace art with the same degree of enthusiasm.”
I get it. Art functions as an academic discipline and as a speculative investment model in our society. It has appearances to keep up. But those functions are secondary to contemporary art’s most valuable function in society—to reflect ourselves to ourselves in ways that shift our understanding. And, just maybe, those shifts will help us see how to change our world for the better.
Today, Belmore’s art only grows in incisiveness, in beauty and rigour, as the Audain citation put it. For Belmore herself, making live performance art or videos or repurposing taillight assemblies into sculpture is merely a continuation of what humans have always done. When they had the time and skill, they would refine a form or embellish their clothing and tools.
“I see myself as no different from the creative person of 500 years ago. I’m living in this time, in the 21st century, and I’m still doing the same thing we’ve always done, you know? But now I have different objects to use to make something that articulates who we are and how we are in this moment. I think it’s really that simple. It’s not complicated.”
Read more from our Winter 2024 issue. Hair and makeup by Win Liu for Lizbell Agency. Photographer’s Assistant Laura Baldwinson.
