Rebecca Belmore grapples with time and history

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      Many of us live out our defining stories without being able to articulate them. That’s why we look to artists: to conjure meaning out of raw experience, form out of inchoate memory. Over lunch in a quiet nook of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Rebecca Belmore reflects on experience and memory and the two intertwined narratives that characterize her multidisciplinary art practice.

      Born into a large Anishinabe family in Upsala, Ontario, the acclaimed Vancouver-based artist recalls a childhood expedition to the place where her mother was born. “Of course, it was nowhere near a hospital,” Belmore says matter-of-factly. The site was a cabin on a tiny island in a lake near Sioux Lookout, in the far reaches of the Canadian Shield. .”

      “As a kid, it was amazing to go to this little island, and there was a beach and a bay and we had lunch and our mother took us to this clearing where she spoke of being born.” The wooden structure had rotted away entirely, Belmore recalls. “There was nothing left but these impressions in the earth where there had been a cabin.”

      Twenty years later, Belmore and her younger sister made a canoe trip with the intention of revisiting the place. “I took a video camera with me,” she recounts. “I wanted to document it.” But since their childhood journey, their mother had died, rivers had been dammed, and waterways had changed. They couldn’t locate the island, couldn’t record an image of where the cabin had stood. “When I tell these two stories, I think it’s about memory and how memory is constantly shifting and changing,” Belmore says.

      “Yes, I did witness something as a child, but I could not find it again as an adult. And something in that speaks to the idea of history, of aboriginal people, being somehow lost. At the same time, it speaks to the fact that what I saw as a child created a strong impulse in me.”

      It was the impulse to make art. “As a kid,” she says, “I could recognize this impression in the earth as something beautiful in form and beautiful in the whole idea of time and history.”

      Belmore’s performances, sculptures, installations, and photographs contend with time and history, with memory, place, culture, and gender. They grapple with the ways in which these elements are inscribed on the body and in the earth. And they express these themes through simple, repetitive movements, accumulations of natural materials, and images of women’s bodies, often bound like mummies in lengths of cloth. All this is evident in her solo show Rebecca Belmore: Rising to the Occasion. Surveying 22 works created between 1987 and 2008, it opens at the VAG this Saturday (June 7) and runs to October 5.

      “Belmore’s work is, at heart, a provocation,” writes the VAG’s Kathleen Ritter, one of the show’s curators. In her catalogue essay, Ritter adds: “Her performances and installations confront us with images of loss, struggle, and silence.” Belmore’s early career was built almost entirely on performance art, whose props and costumes often did not survive their fleeting first use.

      Video documents of five of her performances, however, will be on view in the VAG exhibition, along with her photos, mixed-media sculpture, and reconfigured installations. “The whole premise of my show here at the VAG is to try to make links between my performance work and my sculpture,” Belmore explains. An example is her just-completed sculpture Storm. Constructed out of rolls of camouflage fabric and a red-cedar log split lengthwise, it evolved from Making Always War, a performance Belmore gave at the University of British Columbia in March. Both works involve nailing the military fabric, manufactured in the United States for use in Iraq and named “3-Color Desert Camouflage”, to big, rough pieces of wood.

      Belmore says she was interested in employing the log as a symbol of both the body and our relationship with nature. She found an odd resonance in the “potentiality” of the camouflage material. “I like the idea that the fabric has not yet been transformed into war apparel.” She also liked the irony of the camouflage, an attempt to blend people into their natural surroundings while they mete out death and destruction. “It’s the whole idea of human beings versus nature,” Belmore says. “Or is it the nature of war?”

      A work in which performance and installation are one is Fountain, which Belmore exhibited at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Immensely ambitious, it consisted of a video rear-projected onto a vertical screen of moving water. At the VAG, the design has been modified so that the video will be projected onto a Plexiglas screen, over which water will fall.

      Shot on Iona Island, where the north arm of the Fraser River meets the Strait of Georgia, the work records Belmore, as she struggles and falls and struggles again in the cold water. Alluding to cosmologies and creation myths, environmental concerns, and the violence of history, the action ends with her throwing a bucket of blood at the camera.

      The performance was created in direct response to its West Coast location, to both place and displacement. Belmore moved to Vancouver from her native Ontario in 2001. “I’m very much aware that I’m in a very different place, this being Coast Salish territory, and this being an entirely different landscape than the place where I came from,” she says.

      Belmore’s recent work, she suggests, melds aspects of her ancestral home with those of her adopted city. What binds these different sites together is her body—which, Ritter observes, is central to her work. It is the instrument of her performances, the bearer of her memories, and the testament to long-unspoken histories.

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