Rebecca Belmore All of My Relations
As a multidisciplinary artist working in performance and lens-based media, Rebecca Belmore creates scenes of aching endurance and forceful grace. Since the 1990s, Belmore’s images have probed the politics of First Nations representation in Canada, often melding the photographic with the tactile, as with her very first portraits, in which the Anishinaabe artist’s face is decoupaged onto cut wood, in sly subversion of the wooden “Indian” heads that dot many rural landscapes and settler imaginations. Whether placing subjects—often her sister, Florene—in strange architectural contortions of the body, or featuring materials as organic as a wash of clay or a strip of cloth to parse through the pain of state violence against Indigenous people, Belmore’s work definitively expands the field of conceptual photography to which artists such as Cindy Sherman, Suzy Lake, and Shelley Niro belong.
Earlier this year, the curator Wanda Nanibush, who organized the touring exhibition Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental, spoke with Belmore about the power and possibilities of visual reenactment. As Belmore notes, “The photographs re-create the performer who is being watched but refusing the gaze.”
I played the roles of these five sisters, which were visual representations of women I would see in my community.
Wanda Nanibush: Rebecca, how did you get started in art making?
: Well, I went to art school in Toronto, to what was then called the Ontario College of Art. I came to the big city from Thunder Bay, which is an industrial logging town, a railway town, a blue-collar, working-class kind of city. For me, getting out of there was tough. By that I mean that it was a moment in my life
