During the summer months, Rebecca Belmore was invited to use the space of the Belkin Satellite as a studio for producing works that would comprise her solo exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery from October 4-December 1, 2002.

The exhibition at the Belkin Art Gallery  features five new works created during a residency at the Belkin Satellite. Belmore’s work stages a relationship between bodily performance and installation. Vigil is based on a street performance by Belmore in polemical commemoration of the women who have gone missing in the downtown east side of Vancouver. The performance gives a contemporary context to the installation The Named and The Unnamed, which is a reflection on the larger implications of the local event. Blood on the Snow evokes a deafening stillness, a scene of comfort disrupted by traces of violence. In a third installation, a canoe is in the process of overturning—a vessel emptied of its body, suspended over the black depths of water, or death. Moving from the narrative to the poetic, from action to quiet reflection, Belmore’s new work speaks of the larger questions plaguing human existential awareness.

Between 2001 and 2008, the Belkin Satellite operated as an auxiliary space in downtown Vancouver that presented a mix of exhibitions by local artists, new projects by mid-career artists, experimental projects by UBC curatorial studies students, and served as an additional venue for the Belkin’s permanent collection. Its location at 555 Hamilton Street is Vancouver’s most enduring single gallery space as the prior site of the Bau-Xi Gallery from 1964 to 1972 and the Contemporary Art Gallery from 1973 to 2001; in August 2008, the Or Gallery took over the site.