Rita McKeough is an installation and performance artist based in Calgary. Her work incorporates audio, electronics and mechanical performing objects. Since the late 70s, McKeough has been committed to creating chaotic and immersive installations that reconfigure contradictions and tensions in our everyday lives. McKeough consistently works from a feminist perspective, and her recent work focuses on the environmental impacts of oil production and demonstrates her desire to use sound to create a rhythmic voice of agency and empathy to articulate forces of resistance in the natural world. McKeough’s work has been featured in Radio Rethink: Art Sound and Transmission (Banff Centre for the Arts, 1994), Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (YYZ Books, 2004), and Rita McKeough: Works (Emmedia, Truck Gallery and MST performative art festival, 2018). McKeough is currently teaching at the Alberta University of the Arts and is grateful to have worked with many extraordinary students and colleagues throughout her teaching career.
Image: Rita McKeough, H, 2014. Fourteen-day performance work with audio, video and kinetic objects, Mondo Monde New Media Festival, Faucet Media Arts Centre, Sackville, NB. Production assistance, Rachael Chiasson. Photo Credit Struts and Faucet Media Arts Centre.
Image description: A photograph of Rita in a squirrel suit. They are in room with small cots lining the walls. In the cots are cell phones with blankets on them. There are chords connecting the network of cell phones to small boxes with branches protruding from them. An image of a forest is projected on the back wall. The eye of the squirrel appears to look directly at the camera as it crouches down touching a blanket on one of the cell phone cots with a pinecone on it.
Remediation Room is proud to support the launch of Centre for Interspecies Mutual Support in Troubled Times (CIMSITT). CIMSITT facilitates interactions between species to enact possible systems of support and communication between plant, animals, insects, birds and people. Providing collaborative, experimental enactments of interspecies interactions, the CIMSITT develops sound and language translations systems for communication between species with the aim of renewing habitats and sharing coping strategies and tactics for survival in toxic environments.
Images: Rita McKeough, "darkness is as deep as the darkness is", 2020. Installation with sound, video, electronics and performance. Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Production assistance Jeremy Pavka, Ariel Ty, Alex Moon, Rachael Chiasson, Jude Major. Photos: Donald Lee. Image description: a corner view of a dark gallery space with three projections on the walls. Each projection shows a close-up image of an animal or bird's face, from left to right: an eagle, a wolf, and a deer. Light patterns the floor in the shape of fern fronds.
Image description: a large gallery space containing rows and rows of scaffold-like wooden towers topped with green sword ferns that stretch to the back of the gallery. The photograph is taken down the centre of an aisle that a visitor would walk down to view the installation.