Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain is conceived for the Canada Pavilion at the Giardini di Castello for the 51st Venice Biennale. An image is projected through falling water. The projected image is an edited DVD of a video shot cinema-style on an industrial zone beach near Vancouver. It is a cold, grey winter day, typical of the North American Pacific Northwest in January. The action is in five parts. The artist flails in the water near the shore struggling with a bucket. Next, in a calm state, she kneels and holds the vessel beneath the surface of the water. Then she rises and walks on the shore. After that, she stops and tosses the contents of the pail toward the lens, covering the screen with a sheet of blood. And, lastly, she is seen through the film of blood that fragments and distorts the image. The action has an ambiguous meaning that is associated with awakening and emerging. There is a sense of a task to be done; one of ritual and portent.
Fountain deals with elementals or essences: fire + water = blood. The time is both now, in the industrialized landscape of North America, and in another zone, a time of creation, myth and prophecy. The element of water is represented both as a body of water in the projection and literally as a wall of falling water. Water turns to blood. As befits our times, we don’t know whether this is a metaphor for creation and connectedness or an apocalyptic vision.
A catalogue with essays by Jann Bailey, Jessica Bradley, Jolene Rickard and Scott Watson is available.
Rebecca Belmore: Fountain is curated by Jann LM Bailey and Scott Watson and organized by the Kamloops Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Official Canadian participation at the Venice Biennale is coordinated by a committee made up of the Canada Council for the Arts, Foreign Affairs Canada and the National Gallery of Canada. The Canadian Embassy in Rome assists in the preparation and launch of the exhibition in Italy.
Image (above): Rebecca Belmore, Fountain (production still), 2005. Photo: José Ramón González
Rebecca Belmore, Fountain (production still), 2005. Photo: José Ramón González