1988 / Outside the Thunder Bay Art Gallery / Thunder Bay, ON
In her performance titled, Artifact #671B, she took advantage of the spectacle of the Winter Olympics held in Calgary to draw attention to the multinational company, Shell Oil. She tagged her body like an artifact in a museum, but with one important twist, one of the signatures was the Shell corporate logo, marking corporate incursion on First Nation space. In doing so, she revealed the duplicity of a company that provided corporate sponsorship of the Olympic exhibition, The Spirit Sings, which featured Canada’s First Nations people, while securing drilling rights in the territories of outstanding Lubicon Cree land claims.
Jolene Rickard, Rebecca Belmore: Performing Power, Fountain, Kamloops Art Gallery and Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2005
Photo credit: Bill Lindsay, J. David Galway / The Chronicle Journal, January 13, 1988
