Double Take // Rebecca Belmore
Running from April through September, the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept features ishkode (fire), a piece by Rebecca Belmore.
At the Whitney Biennial, ishkode (fire), 2021, made from clay and bullet casings. In the background, Guadalupe Rosales’s photographs of East Los Angeles, 2022.Credit Charlie Rubin for The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/arts/design/whitney-biennial-review.html.
Of the work, critic Peter Schjeldahl has written for The New Yorker:
“Don’t necessarily expect to understand much at a glance. A piece by Rebecca Belmore, an Anishinaabe artist from Canada, “ishkode (fire)” (2021), centers on a representation of a sleeping bag, cast in clay, that appears to cocoon a standing figure not otherwise in evidence. Surrounding it, on the floor, are thousands of small-calibre bullet casings intermixed with copper wire. It is beautiful both before you speculate on its thematic aim and after. I single it out for the glory of painstaking design that typifies scores of works in the show. I fancy that pandemic isolation, at once depriving and disburdening artists of career exigencies, has fostered lonely cultivations of perfection.”
Fringe, 2008, inkjet print transparency in fluorescent light box, 81.5 x 244.8 x 16.7 centimetres. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, purchased 2011. Installation view, “Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental,” Remai Modern, Saskatoon, 2019. Photo: Blaine Campbell. Image courtesy the Remai Modern, Saskatoon.
Border Crossings has consistently featured Belmore’s work, including two extensive interviews. Read the 2019 interview from Issue #150 HERE
Fountain, 2005, production stills. Photograph: José Ramón Gonzáles.
Read the 2005 interview from Issue #95 HERE
