Rebecca Belmore stars in her video piece Fountain (2005) which shows her struggling to put out a fire with water that turns to blood. (Noam Gonick/Rebecca Belmore) Vancouver artist Rebecca Belmore caused a stir at the Venice Biennale in 2005 with Fountain, a video showing a figure struggling to put out a driftwood fire with a bucket of water.

The water becomes blood, turning the whole scene red and neatly underscoring Belmore's often controversial and political approach to art.

Fountain is included in the exhibit of Belmore's work now at the Vancouver Art Gallery, the first large-scale survey for this Anishinabe artist.

"I was just interested in being a First Nations person from Canada going over to this European venue [the Biennale], so I decided to focus on the whole idea of water," Belmore told CBC News.

"And my whole idea is turning water into blood, blood into water. Water and blood can be red in many different ways."

Curator Daina Augaitis considers Belmore "one of the most significant visual artists living and working in Vancouver."

Born in Upsala, Ont., Belmore attended the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto. She is internationally known for her performance, video and installation art.

Her work is often about the politics of identity, especially identity for aboriginal women, and addresses issues of violence and abuse.

And it often stars Belmore herself.

"I'm predominantly known as a performance artist, therefore I think that my body, my physical presence, is always implicated in the work," she said.

Performance in the moment

"You know, for me performance is just a way to go out into the public space, out into reality if you want to say that, to address very specific issues. So performance for me is very much about the moment, even though, of course, in that moment, history and the future is implicated."

The title of the exhibit, featuring 20 works by Belmore, is Rising To The Occasion, which is also the name of a sculpture she created in 1987 in response to a visit to Thunder Bay by the Duke and Duchess of York.

"It's basically my version of Victorian ball gown meets Canadian beaver house," Belmore said.

Rising to the Occasion is the dress, incorporating birch bark, sticks and trinkets, that Belmore wore to greet the Duke and Duchess of York in 1987. (Art Gallery of Ontario) "The front looks like some strange version of a Victorian ball gown with teacup saucers as breastplates. And in the back is this bustle which resembles a beaver dam, and within this beaver dam are Royal Family memorabilia, trinkets, shiny objects, perhaps trade goods, bits of birch bark and a whole bunch of sticks."

Belmore wore the dress, a combination of clichés of British and aboriginal culture, to greet officials, an example of her dark sense of humour.

In more recent works, Belmore is equally political. But she says she's stripping down her performance works, using only what she can hold or carry. Gone is the electronic and technical support system she used to employ to augment her work.

"I've discovered that less is more," she said. "Also I've stopped talking. I've shut up. It's really interesting how you can speak with just the body without a spoken language, and that's a way for me to be global and address universal ideas."

Rising To The Occasion shows at the Vancouver Art Gallery until Oct. 5.

With files from Paul Grant