Opening reception: Saturday, February 5, 6-9 pm

Rebecca Belmore’s powerful installations confront the viewer with images of loss, struggle and silence. The Named and the Unnamed (2002) incorporates a video of Vigil that Belmore performed at the corner of Gore and Cordova Streets on June 23, 2002. The Named and the Unnamed is in polemical commemoration of the women who have gone missing in the downtown eastside of Vancouver. It is a reflection on the larger implications of this local event.

Born in Upsala, Ontario, Rebecca Belmore is an artist currently living in Vancouver, British Columbia. She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and is internationally recognized for her performance and installation art. Belmore was Canada’s official representative at the 2005 Venice Biennale. Her work has appeared in numerous exhibitions both nationally and internationally.

We thank Rebecca Belmore for lending her edition of The Named and the Unnamed for this exhibition. The edition from the collection of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery is currently presented in Stop(the)Gap: International Indigenous art in motion at the Anne & Gordon Samstag Museum of Art, University of South Australia.

The Named and the Unnamed is presented as part of Faces, an exhibition at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery. Faces is presented in three locations in Vancouver: the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Walter C. Koerner Library and the Satellite Gallery. The exhibition explores the diverse ways faces are represented, looking specifically at how notions of gender, race and class affect our understanding of them—aiming to reveal, in the process, that this uniquely human trait is anything but neutral.

Faces includes drawings, paintings, photographs, sculpture and video from the collections and archives of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Gatineau) and the American Museum of Natural History Library (New York).

Image (above): Rebecca Belmore, The Named and the Unnamed (detail), 2002, video projection, screen, light bulbs. Photo: Howard Ursuliak.

Satellite Gallery operated from 2010 to 2015 and was a project of the Michael O’Brian Family Foundation. Located on the second floor of 560 Seymour in the former A&B Sound building, Satellite Gallery provided an experimental exhibition space committed to supporting contemporary art practices, shared between Charles H. Scott Gallery (ECUAD), the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (UBC), the Museum of Anthropology (UBC) and Presentation House Gallery.