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Major Rebecca Belmore exhibit launches at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal
Posted on July 03, 2019 | Updated August 06, 2019, 9:07am
Decades of work by renowned artist Rebecca Belmore is the subject of a new Canadian exhibition.
A major overview of three decades of work by celebrated interdisciplinary artist Rebecca Belmore recently opened at the Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal (MAC).
The show, called Facing the Monumental, represents the largest exhibition of Rebecca’s work to date.
Rebecca, whose work is “(r)ooted in the political and social realities of Indigenous communities,” according to her biography, is a member of the Lac Seul First Nation (Anishinaabe). She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Emily Carr University of Art + Design in 2017.
Organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) and curated by Wanda Nanibush, Curator of Indigenous Art, the survey vaunts Rebecca’s rich body of work which includes sculptures, installations, photography and videos, some of which are based on performances.
“With boundless beauty, sensitivity and resilience, her work explores our problematic relationships with territory, women’s lives, historic events and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples,” the MAC’s official announcement states.
Rebecca’s themes include “conflicts and issues related to climate change, access to water, land use, homelessness, and human migration and displacement,” the announcement continues.
In a statement, curator Wanda Nanibush said Rebecca “makes it clear that artists are meant to show us something about being human, to understand our condition as connected to the earth, to water, to all non-human living entities. Belmore’s practice connects us to our fundamental vulnerability—something that is universal and yet irreducibly different. We experience this elemental openness in her work.”
Having first begun working as a performance artist in the late 1980s, Rebecca’s works contain “a compelling duality: her poetic representations of human dignity, the beauty of youth, a sleeping subject, the power of water or the quieting effect of snow are all in contrast to the turmoil of our world. Her art asks us to consider where we are, and what we face in our future.”
The MAC will host “Facing the Monumental” through Oct. 6, 2019.
“The world will be a different place in twenty years, and we have no idea what that looks like. I think that’s why we have conversations, that’s why we have to listen, that’s why we make art.”
