Community Based Artwork

Rebecca Belmore’s work spans a multitude of media, including photography, installation, video, and performance, which make sharp and poignant commentary on racial stereotypes, gender, and politics of identity. Often Belmore depicts herself bound in awkward, uncomfortable positions as if being held captive by an invisible tormentor. Or slashed viciously across the back. These and other provocative images elicit a strange sense of ambiguity in the viewer leaving him/her unsure about the attacker or oppressor, but with an obvious sense of repression and victim hood.

The Belmore exhibit at the VAG this past summer coincided with the recent apology by the Canadian government for abusive treatment of aboriginal peoples in residential schools. A possible financial compensation of more than $2 billion offered to approximately 80, 000 residential school survivors is also being reviewed. Historically, children were taken away from their families and placed in church and government run schools, where they faced physical, sexual and mental abuses. The children were punished if they spoke their own language, publicly flogged and made to feel ashamed of their own heritage. This caused scars of an emotional type, wounding the pride of an entire people, burdening them with self-hatred and loathing, leading to a plague of various self-destructive behaviors including drug abuse, alcohol abuse, gambling and domestic violence. Belmore’s works speak directly to the issues surrounding bondage, bodily violence, and social marginalization. The Rebecca Belmore exhibit comments on larger national concerns, and invokes in the viewer a sense of sympathy for the First Nations peoples, and brings to the general public a recognition of historical injustice.

Ironically, the institutions which lend her support and give her a platform on which to voice her grievances are the very institutions which have victimized the community for whom she speaks. This puts her in a paradoxical position of either biting the hand that feeds her, or selling out, or both.

http://www.rebeccabelmore.com/home.html