Biography

Rebecca Belmore was born into a large Anishinaabe family (part of the Lac Seul First Nation) in Upsala, Ontario, Canada. She was raised in Sioux Lookout, and spent every summer until the age of 16 with her maternal grandparents in Northwestern Ontario, with whom she spoke only in the language of her ancestors, Ojibwa.

She explains that her grandmother "resisted the English language" and refused to learn English, whereas Belmore's mother was committed to her speaking only English in order to be able to survive and thrive in "this new world".

Belmore's two older brothers were both sent to residential schools where they were forbidden to speak their Native language, and Belmore herself was sent to a predominantly white high school in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where she has to live with a non-Indigenous family. As has been the case for many Native youth, this experience caused Belmore to develop a sense of displacement and cultural loss. Due to the feeling of being ostracized, she dropped out, and worked a series of odd jobs before completing her secondary education some years later.

Interest in Art

During her final year, she became close with an art teacher who encouraged her to submit a drawing to a competition, for which she won first prize.

Belmore says that she wanted to become an artist: "Because I didn't know what else to do. I could have become a truck driver because I liked the road and the freedom of the road. I used to be a waitress in a truck stop. I think that art is freedom and truck driving is freedom."

Significance

When she was in college, she has developed a bold alter-ego named High-Tech Teepee Trauma Mama, who discomforted audiences by enacting outrageously exaggerated Native stereotypes. She has began carrying performances in public spaces (such as Artifact 617B (1988) and Rising to the Occasion (1987-1991)). These interventions aimed to draw attention to the "dispossession of First Nations land and livelihood" as well as to the hypocrisy of oil companies and the "absurdity of Canada's ties with the British monarchy".

As Richard William Hill writes in his column for Canadian art her work belongs to the period 'defined by the struggles of the first large wave of art-school-trained Indigenous artists to make space for themselves in galleries, museums, and magazines.' The art of Rebeccah Belmore and many other Indigenous artists has 'changed how we imagine ourselves and our place in the world', giving Indigenous people the voice and representation in the world of art.

The key feature of Belmore's work which has gained her international recognition throughout the 1990s and early 200s is her ability to expose the hard, unvarnished truths of colonial power. Through the use of performance, Belmore directly confronts and engages her audience in dialogues regarding colonial violence and the erasure of identity.

Works

Facing the Monumental, 2012

House of Wayward Spirits, Queen’s Park, Toronto, ON

A peformance which serves as a monument to the earth, to women, to life and links it to the harm made by colonization. the exhibition included a 150-year-old indigenous red oak tree, a living witness to colonization, being wrapped in kraft paper. The artist placed a woman into the installation and wraped her and the tree together.

Critics commenting on Belmore's early career noted that she honed the art of "speaking without language". Art historian Claire Bishop has described this as the "unease and discomfort" that can in fact increase a participatory work's "artistic impact", impressing upon viewers that these issues continue to impact a great number of Canadians, even today.

Crimes of Passion in Paradise and Beyond, 2002

Centre for Caribbean Contemporary Art, Port of Spain, Trinidad

Two fresh coconuts. One machete. White sheet. Small portable CD player. Alejandro Escovedo’s tune Across the River. Large metal mixing bowl holding a round stone. Four litres of wine and four litres of milk. Four bare lightbulbs on the floor. Newspaper with article and picture of a young mother who was macheted to death with her infant.

Making always War, 2008

2008 / Frederic Lasserre Building courtyard, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC

'Working for forty-five minutes, using a salvaged piece of west coast timber, buckets of sand from nearby Spanish Banks, six Desert Storm shirts purchased from an army surplus store, a hammer, some nails, and the sound of pow-wow music emanating from my truck, I set out to make, to build, to destroy, and to raise my thoughts about war. Driving nails through the camouflage fabric and into what used to be a majestic tree—I assaulted, soothed and shaped a personal version of a memorial pole with the setting sun and then working in the headlights of my own vehicle… making, making always war'.

More works by artist:

https://www.rebeccabelmore.com/