The Blanket

2011 / Plug In ICA, Winnipeg, MB / Video

Rebecca Belmore’s 4½-minute video called The Blanket shows a dark-haired woman wrapping and unwrapping herself in a red and black Hudson’s Bay point blanket while she moves about a snow-covered Manitoba landscape. The video is not without a sense of anger (the blanket has a poisonous history in relations between white and native Canadians), but The Blanket is also lyric, elegant and sensuous, qualities it shares with the best work in Close Encounters: The Next 500 Years.

Robert Enright, New Aboriginal art show tells stories of adaptation and transformation, The Globe and Mail, February 7, 2011

Video credit: Noam Gonick