Trauma Mama

Like her video The Named and the Unnamed, one of Belmore’s most recent projects, The Capture of Mary March, is based on an abduction narrative. On March 5, 1819, British settlers at Red Indian Lake in Newfoundland abducted a young Beothuk woman named Demasduit. They called her Mary March. The settlers had the misguided idea that, if they held Demasduit in captivity for ten months, showing her they intended no harm, then upon her return they would be able to establish better relations with the Beothuk. Demasduit’s husband was murdered during her abduction, however, and Demasduit herself died before her release. Many of the details of the story are known from the drawings of Shanawdithit, who witnessed Demasduit’s capture and who was also abducted a few years later and renamed Nancy April. When she died of tuberculosis in 1829, Shanawdithit was the last known Beothuk in Newfoundland.

Belmore’s The Capture of Mary March consists of three large photographs printed onto canvas of a young native woman with softly cropped hair and the sporty white shirt and pants of a suburban housewife, and a Victorian armchair. Set in an industrial space with an exposed brick background, in all three images she is encircled by a swarming line of flames. In one, she sits demurely in the chair, gazing into the distance; in another, she stands stiffly with her hand on the back of the chair, the expression on her face vacant and desolate. And in the third image she is on the ground, her cheek resting on the chair’s threadbare mauve upholstery and her hands gripping its sides, her face now tense with a mixture of melancholy and utter despondency. Belmore’s Mary March has the superficial trappings of being assimilated in a generic version of white bourgeois culture, but inwardly she is unassimilated. The fire that surrounds her represents both the boundaries of her captivity and the heat of her rage and contempt.

Belmore’s working style is intuitive, spontaneous, and even chaotic, so the coda to The Capture of Mary March was unfinished as of her recent show in Toronto. She plans on taking a photograph of the chair on fire, afloat in the Pacific. The burned chair will be exhibited facing the photograph, a reproduction of a portrait of Mary March beaded to its seat and back. Curiously dated “18 . . . ,” the original portrait was painted by Lady Hamilton during Demasduit’s captivity.

“The first time I visited the site in Venice, I wanted to sit down and cry, wondering what I would do,” Belmore told me. “The second time, I was calmer.” Not only is the Venice Biennale the highest profile international venue Belmore has ever exhibited in, but the Canadian pavilion presents its own idiosyncratic problems—it is a 1950sera structure that mimics the shape of a teepee. It is easy to imagine the former High Tech Teepee Trauma Mama going into a giddy delirium over such a confused postmodern contraption. At forty-five, Belmore has not lost her wicked sense of humour and fun—late after the Toronto opening of The Capture of Mary March, I watched her groove on the dance floor at an aboriginal hip-hop party—but for Venice she will stay the course of her recent work. She has created a new video installation, titled Fountain, and its theme is water. Water has been important in Belmore’s art for a long time. In her performances, she often ritually cleanses herself in water, and her monumental sculpture, Temple, which was shown at Toronto’s Power Plant gallery in 1996, was built up out of bags of polluted lake water, but she has never explored water directly as a powerful, elusive element. It is surely important that the burning chair in the coda to The Capture of Mary March is extinguished, not by snow, but by the water of the sea. Water is an open, flowing incarnation of snow. The water of memory, the water of redemption, the water of oblivion.

When I asked her whether she would do any performances during her stay in Venice, Belmore flashed a mischievous smile, and said “I am told that it would be good for me, and of course I always do what’s good for me.”