Interview: Rebecca Belmore

Rebecca Belmore is an artist I very much admire for taking a pointed, courageous approach--both to artmaking in general and to using art to express her own experiences as a First Nations woman. So I really wish I could get to the west coast and see the survey on her work recently opened (June 7) at the Vancouver Art Gallery. As I can't do that, I did take time to look at her past work and chat with her on the phone about it. The National Post ran a condensed version of the interview online yesterday and in print today. There were so many more questions I wanted to ask her: What was it like to represent Canada in Venice in 2005? What do you think of the current "redevelopment" of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the run up to the Olympics? Guess I'll just have to save that for another time.