Art and Social Change: Performance Art

Rebecca Belmore is an artist and the recipient of the 2013 Laureate, Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Her art reflects herself as an artist, as a woman and as an Anishinaabe. Her works are filled with reference to gender-based ritual and she provides a foundation for the viewer/audience to be moved to action. What follows is a short video that I found to be provocative and insightful into the act of creating art.

Another piece, Vigil (2002), which she performed on the streets of the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver in 2002, commemorates First Nations women that were murdered or went missing off the street of Vancouver. Her work seeks to conjure remembrances of colonial oppression and to restore our public memory of those women lost and forgotten as not only women, but First Nations people.

During the performance, viewed here, the passersby participates as witness as she scrubs the street on hands and knees, lighting votive candles, and nailing a long red dress she is wearing to a telephone pole. The curatorial description of her performance goes on to describe her struggle to free herself the dress tearing from her body and "hanging in tatters from the nails, reminiscent of the tattered lives of women forced onto the streets for their survival in an alien urban environment" . . . I invite you to watch this and to follow what the artist will do next.