Rebecca Belmore: Facing The Monumental

About

Rebecca Belmore is one of the most important contemporary artists working along the border of art and politics today. Her poetic and beautiful works respond to the pressing issues of our time, including water and land rights, women’s lives and dignity, violence against Indigenous people by the state and police, and the role of the artist in contemporary life.

Belmore’s diverse yet cohesive body of work over the last thirty years has voiced an ethos of remembering the forgotten, listening to the marginal, speaking the silenced, and facing the monumental with passion, beauty, intuition, strength and humility.

The exhibition is organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario and curated by Wanda Nanibush, Curator, Indigenous Art.

Rebecca Belmore: Facing the Monumental provides ample room for Belmore’s larger works to breathe and for audiences to be immersed in her large sculptures, installations and photography. Some smaller, more intimate spaces will be home to individual media installations.

The exhibition draws attention to her use of natural materials and the tension between difficult subjects and beautiful aesthetics. Themes in her work include water, cultural freedom, homelessness, and violence against Indigenous men, women and communities.

Included are over 20 major sculptures, installations, photographs and performance-based works, with many works never before exhibited in a Toronto museum. Audiences can see famous favourites like Rising to the Occasion (1987–1989), Named and Unnamed (2002), and Fountain (2005), as well as a showcase of new works by the artist.