Painting the Town Red

Production still from Fountain, by Rebecca Belmore. Photo José Ramón González. Courtesy The Belkin Gallery.

When it’s not even noon on day one of the press preview of the art exhibition at the Venice Biennale and there’s already a massive lineup outside the Canadian pavilion, you know the exhibit inside has struck a chord.

This biannual gathering in Italy is the pinnacle of the contemporary art scene, so when a Native artist with no international profile draws crowds like this, it’s no wonder presiding Canadian officials are gloating. There’s even an ironic twist: the installation that’s causing such a buzz is a fountain, essentially an Old World import brought back by a New World Aboriginal, with a message that is as beautifully realized as it is forceful.

Rebecca Belmore’s part-sculpture, part-video installation — aptly named Fountain — is a technologically complex and exquisitely executed piece of art. It begins with a simple, veil-like sheet of water falling across the inside of a darkened room. Slowly, clouds begin to take shape on the water’s surface — the opening images of a two-and-a-half-minute video loop that’s projected onto the liquid from behind. The images change as the camera begins to move across a driftwood-strewn shore and then toward a pile of wood, which bursts thunderously into yellow and orange flames, rendered almost crystalline as they flicker through the waterfall screen. Then, Belmore herself appears, with short-cropped hair, jeans and a sweater, and flails in the shallow water, struggling to fill an old pail. Looking exhausted but resolute, she emerges from the water, plods slowly toward the camera and then hurls the bucket’s contents at the lens; it’s no longer water, now, but blood. Through a downward stream of red, Belmore gazes accusingly out at the viewer.

For an installation that relies so heavily on video, Fountain is amazingly tactile. From the wet spray the fountain gives off, to the primordial sounds of wind, fire and Belmore’s grunts, to the startling flow of images on falling water, the artist has turned what could have been a one-dimensional display into an overwhelming sensory experience.

From Fountain. Photo José Ramón González. Courtesy The Belkin Gallery.

It’s also heavy in mythological meaning. Belmore shot the piece on an industrial beach near land belonging to the Musqueam tribe, which today happens to reside in close proximity to Vancouver International Airport, lumber mills and a sewage-treatment plant. The choice of setting was intentional — it’s the locus for a contradictory mishmash of modern and ancient influences, nature and commerce, as well as the purity of water and the scourge of industrial pollution. The looped narrative of water-into-blood has the feel of a Sisyphean cautionary tale — mankind’s punishing inability to escape making the same mistakes, mistakes that may be killing us.

It’s a theme Belmore has explored in much of her work.

“It functions like a warning, to try to make people think about the value of water,” says Belmore, taking a break outside her exhibition. Behind her, the sound of ferries chugging in the lagoon mingles with the hiss of water emanating from within the pavilion.

“I know it’s not a happy theme, but I want to provoke some kind of feeling about our own bodies and our need for fresh water. But there are other levels, too. The possibility of violence and aggression,” Belmore adds, two other major issues she has tackled.

Belmore is Anishinabekwe, part of the Ojibway nation; born and raised in Upsala, Ontario, she now lives in Vancouver. When her proposal for Fountain — which is curated by the Kamloops Art Gallery and the University of British Columbia’s Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery — was selected to represent Canada in Venice, the news surprised some in the art world. At 45, Belmore has only had a handful of shows outside this country; she doesn’t have the international credentials of previous Canadian Biennale participants. In Canada, however, she’s renowned for her courageous art, which boldly puts her body and political vision on display. From her 1991 Creation or Death, We Will Win — where she frantically scooped a pile of sand up a set of stairs to demonstrate the First Nations’ struggle to reclaim their culture — to her 2002 installation, The Named And the Unnamed — a part-sculpture, part-performance piece dedicated to the dozens of women who have disappeared from Vancouver’s Downtown East Side — outrage runs through her work like a powerful current.

From Fountain. Photo José Ramón González. Courtesy The Belkin Gallery.

In Fountain, that current is as material as it is metaphorical. “I wanted to make a work that would stand and read as sculptural,” she explains. “That would have both a storyline and a visual line that runs through it.”

Belmore has worked in a range of media, including photography, video, sculpture and performance art. But her approach to her art is consistently physical; relying little on notes or sketches, Belmore walks through her pieces, first in her mind, then in reality.

“I think it has to do with myself being an Aboriginal person and how my body speaks for itself,” she explains. “It’s the politicized body, it’s the historical body. It’s the body that didn’t disappear. So it means a lot in terms of the presence of the Aboriginal body in the work. And the female body, particularly.”

While it would be reductionist to interpret Fountain as primarily an expression of Belmore’s Nativeness, it also would be difficult to imagine reading the piece without taking her heritage into account. The symbolic presence of the four elements, the transformation of water to blood and the interplay of loss, outrage, purging and reclamation — all these themes take on greater emotional and historical meaning with the knowledge that Belmore is Aboriginal.

So, too, does the presence of the installation in Venice. Belmore designed the Fountain with the Italian lagoon city in mind. Venice is a near-mythical place itself, brimming with fountains, threaded with canals, sitting precariously on the edge of the Adriatic Sea. It’s a port city that at its peak epitomized the spirit of European maritime exploration; later, it also came to reflect the bloodshed of colonialism.

The link between Venice and Vancouver — another water city “obsessed with fountains,” says Belmore — became fixed in her mind as she developed the piece. And the irony of creating a fountain as the first work to be showcased by a Canadian Native woman at the Venice Biennale isn’t lost on her, either.

“I think this whole idea of myself as an Aboriginal woman coming to Venice and bringing back a work that is a fountain,” says Belmore, pausing to find the right words, “… is like throwing it back at you.”

From Fountain. Photo José Ramón González. Courtesy The Belkin Gallery.

No doubt there’s pressure on Aboriginal artists to conform to expectations of what their art should address — land, historic injustices, colonization, the silence that follows a tribe’s disappearance. Belmore stresses that her work isn’t just about loss or a longing for something that no longer exists. She prefers to see it as being about survival.

“People make decisions in order to survive. And to survive, there’s a lot of sacrifice,” Belmore says. “The whole idea of water-to-blood speaks about all of us and how, whatever the wars are about in our current time, our survival and need for water is at stake.”

The 51st International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale opens June 12 and runs until November 6.