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Rebecca Belmore: Fountain

2005 / ISBN 0-88865-634-3
108 pages, b/w and colour, paperback

$10
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Exhibition catalogue from Rebecca Belmore: Fountain at the 2005 51st Venice Biennale’s Canada Pavilion with texts by Scott Watson, Jessica Bradley and Jolene Rickard. Vancouver-based Anishnaabe artist Rebecca Belmore is 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. 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.

 

 

  • Rebecca Belmore

    Artist

    Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe), b. 1960) is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Belmore is widely recognized for her performance, photographic and sculptural work that makes connections between bodies, land and language with ongoing social and political realities faced by Indigenous communities. Questions of authority, narrative and truth resonate throughout her practice. In 2005 she was the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada in the Venice Biennale. Her work has appeared extensively in exhibitions both nationally and internationally, and her solo exhibitions include the Belkin Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, and Justina M. Barnick Gallery.  Belmore has received numerous honours and awards, including the Hnatyshyn Award (2009), the Governor General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts (2013) and Gershon Iskowitz Prize (2016). She attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto, and has received honourary doctorates from OCAD University (2005), Emily Carr University of Art and Design (2018), and NSCAD University (2019).

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  • Jessica Bradley

    Writer
  • Jolene Rickard

    Writer
  • Scott Watson

    Curator, Writer

    Scott Watson (Canadian, b. 1950) is Director Emeritus and Research Fellow at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, University of British Columbia. A curator whose career has spanned more than thirty-five years, Watson is internationally recognized for his research and work in curatorial and exhibition studies, contemporary art and issues, and art theory and criticism. His distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010); the Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in BC Arts (2008) and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). Watson has published extensively in the areas of contemporary Canadian and international art. His 1990 monograph on Jack Shadbolt earned the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize in 1991. Recent publications include Letters: Michael Morris and Concrete Poetry (2015); Thrown: British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and their Contemporaries (2011), a finalist for the 2012 Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize; “Race, Wilderness, Territory and the Origins of the Modern Canadian Landscape” and “Disfigured Nature” (in Beyond Wilderness, McGill University Press, 2007); and “Transmission Difficulties: Vancouver Painting in the 1960s” (in Paint, Vancouver Art Gallery, 2006).

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Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery

University of British Columbia

1825 Main Mall

Vancouver, British Columbia,

Canada V6T 1Z2 Map

xʷməθkʷəy̍əm | Musqueam Territory

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