Autobiography and the Family Frame: Jaret Belliveau’s “Dominion Street”

25 Sep 2010, Posted in Art Reviews, 1 Comments

Autobiography and the Family Frame: Jaret Belliveau’s “Dominion Street”
Gallery TPW
4  February – 6 March, 2010
by Matthew Ryan Smith

Documenting a period of five years, Jaret Belliveau’s Dominion Street presents a visual narrative of his mother’s cancer alongside other incidents within the family frame. Speaking to questions of sickness, love and loss, Belliveau offers the viewer strikingly informal glimpses of his family as he himself would have seen them — in a hospital room, in an alleyway, in his father’s bedroom and so forth. When these photographs are hung in an exhibition space, we are seemingly invited by Belliveau’s autobiographic lens to experience his family’s suffering and to grieve alongside them. We can be assured that there is contentment in between the moments shown in the photographs, but Belliveau consciously fixes his camera on his family’s plight, creating photographs riddled with emotion and affect.

One of the central aims with this recent work, as Belliveau himself explains, was “…to be compassionate to my father losing a wife. Or to my grandmother watching her daughter die.” There is little catharsis for Belliveau in these images, only responsible (and faithful) documentation, and the support that comes from the distance of the camera. The images he captures are affecting simply because most people can relate to them. As cancer sweeps through our families, friends, colleagues, we identity with these images — they generate flash-lit glimpses of our own memories living close to the illness.

Three major threads reveal themselves in this series: the resistance to cancer by the artist’s mother, the maturity of the artist’s brother and the coping of the artist’s father. Viewers are witness to the worsening of Mrs. Belliveau’s health over several photographs, but the artist also captures his mother’s emotional highs. The family orbits Mrs. Belliveau throughout the series, attesting to their strength and resilience.

It is obvious that cancer causes suffering in both  those with the disease and those who are close to them. For Mr. Belliveau, his wife’s cancer has rendered him emotionally and physically weary. In only the few short years of the series, decades of age show in his face. In Saturday Afternoon (2003), Mr. Belliveau’s bed has become a centre of intrigue. He sleeps with arms crossed on a Super Mario Bros. pillowcase sheltered by a bubbly pink blanket. Several years later, after his wife’s death in January of 2005, there is an image of an empty bed with an unsheeted mattress, rumpled blanket and a deeply rust-stained pillow (Untitled, 2006). Mr. Belliveau’s bed has become a site of abject loss. It appears that without the physical presence of his wife, and following the trauma of her death, Mr. Belliveau’s bed has become a metaphor for his emotional and physical desolation.

Considering his father’s bed of sleep alongside his mother’s bed of confinement, Belliveau offers what is arguably the most poignant photograph in the series with Untitled (2004). In it, Mrs. Belliveau is caught in a moment of laughter. She sits up in bed, her oversized green shirt blending into the pale green background of the wall behind. Her hands are held together and a tub of ice cream rests in her lap. In earlier pictures, the representational presence of God is readily available in such works as After Service (2003) where Mrs. Belliveau cleans up after a service she has conducted in her role as a minister. Later, as the cancer worsens, the visual prominence of God, as characterized by the crucifix and other symbols, is diminished. The visual focus has shifted from the incarnation of God to simpler pleasures like ice cream. Arguably, the question of the visibility and invisibility of God is what is most fascinating about the series as a whole. Is this a conscious choice by Belliveau, or mere coincidence? Do the images confront a larger moral and spiritual dilemma?

Combining old family photographs, sculpture, and Belliveau’s recent photographic practice, the exhibition teems with all things autobiographical, so much so that it tends to look “busy.” Particular displays like the collection of old found family photographs, arranged in no particular chronological order, are perhaps intended to add familial context, but they are seemingly out of place and add ambivalence to the current series. Yet, one cannot help but be torn between the idea that the exhibition calls for a narrower, more selective focus on current work on the one hand, and the idea that the complexity of family life, containing heterogeneous circumstances in which past present and future affect each other, demands this kind of complicated representation. What is essentially at question in this exhibition is that area in between comprehension of the artist’s time and space (autobiography) and its representation (exhibition).

Matthew Ryan Smith is a Toronto-based writer, curator and Ph.D. candidate in Art and Visual Culture at The University of Western Ontario. His current research explores the politics of disclosure in contemporary autobiographical and confessional art.