A camera pans over a beach littered with driftwood. As the lens approaches a stack of branches arranged as if for a bonfire, a rocket-like screeching sound pierces the scene. An instant later, the wood goes up in flames. The image fades to a view of the artist Rebecca Belmore submerged in the nearby water. Fully dressed, she flails in the shallows with a metal bucket in her hand, gasping for air. Her body is thrown around by something other than the forces of the waves—an interior torment. Belmore exits onto the beach, carries the bucket toward the camera, and with an arduous groan throws its liquid contents against the lens. What we, the viewers, may expect to be clear water is blood-red, dripping down the lens as the artist stands and looks directly at us until the video ends. In Belmore’s installation Fountain (2005), the sequence was projected onto a wall of falling water inside the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (MACM). In its ambiguity between birth or death, creation or apocalypse, Belmore’s Fountain—her contribution to the Canadian Pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005—is as potent a metaphor today as it was almost 15 years ago. The …