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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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Rebecca Belmore, “The Named and the Unnamed”, 2002 (Photo: Howard Ursuliak).This image was provided for download here.
I am really pleased that Rebecca Belmore is going to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale next year. She is a tough and exciting performance artist from the First Nations. The first time I saw her, in 1997, she performed a strong, scary tribute to Dudley George, ("the first Indigenous person this century to be killed in a land rights dispute in Canada") at a 7A*11d event at the skanky old Symptom Hall in Toronto (now that place worn't no boo-teek hotel).
In 2002 Belmore was part of the group show Houseguests in which contemporary artists infiltrated the AGO's historic Grange property, Toronto's "oldest brick building" (fer gawd's sake). Belmore took over the master bedroom, and slept under a bearskin blanket in the 19th-century four-poster bed.
The video still above is performance footage projected onto a wall that has been studded with light bulbs. I saw this installation at the Art Gallery of Ontario in 2003. The performance is a long ritural "in response to the horrific unfolding of evidence around the serial killing of women from Vancouver's skid row." Belmore is a hard-core performer, with onstage charisma and an unsually unsettling undertone of violence. In the next shot, she takes that rose and pulls it, thorns and all, through her teeth. Another element that I really liked was when she put on a long red dress, picked up a hammer, and started forcefully nailing the dress to a back-alley telephone pole. Belmore is strong, and she knows how to wield a hammer with conviction. Once all the loose pieces of garment were nailed into the wood, Belmore proceeded to tear herself away, rending the dress and leaving it to dangle in tatters. I was impressed by the performance (which had many more elements than I am describing here) but also by the simple distracting beauty of the light bulbs shining through the video. All this to say, Canada is gonna have some kick-ass representation at the big show next summer.