Vancouver-based Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale of Visual Art, the world’s oldest and most prestigious venue for the international display of contemporary art. The Kamloops Art Gallery and the Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, which proposed Rebecca Belmore as the Biennale candidate, were the institutions selected in a nationwide competition to represent Canadian visual arts at the event. The 51st edition of the Venice Biennale opened in June 2005.

Rebecca Belmore’s new work, Fountain, was conceived for the Canada Pavilion at the Giardini in Venice. An image is projected through falling water onto an irregular white rock wall. The projected image is an edited DVD of a video shot cinema-style on an industrial zone beach near Vancouver, Canada. 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.

Image: Rebecca Belmore, Fountain, 2005. Photo: José Ramón González.