Rita mckeough biography

Rita McKeough is a Canadian interdisciplinary artist, musician and educator who frequently works in installation and performance.
Rita McKeough is a performance and installation artist and musician.
Artist Biography Rita McKeough is an installation and performance artist based in Calgary.

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darkness is as deep as the darkness is

Rita McKeough

February 1 – March 17, 2020; September 26 – November 13, 2020

Past events

Opening Reception: January 31, 2020
Exhibition Tours: February 5, 2020
Banff Gallery Hops: February 15, 2020
Art Break: March 3, 2020

Nationally recognized for her complex installation-based works integrating electronic media, sculpture, sound, and performance, darkness is as deep as the darkness is by Calgary-based artist Rita McKeough is an invitation into an imagined subterranean just below the ground’s surface. Space where darkness connotes a richness of lived entanglements between beings above and below the soil, the work also references contested sites of urban development and extraction that penetrate into the burrows, roots, and remains of animals and plants. Assembling hundreds of sculptural elements, the work is characteristic of McKeough’s employment of what she terms ‘performing objects’; denoting the narrative roles she ascribes to each of the electronically-animated components within an installation. [1] While in rece

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MCKEOUGH, Rita

Long Haul
Friday October 27 and Saturday October 28 11 am – 6 pm (installation)
(the artist will be at the space at 1 pm, 3 pm & 5 pm, in between outdoor walking performances)
OCAD Professional Gallery

Accompanied by a motorized tree, the artist combs downtown Toronto for fragments of natural material like leaves and branches found lying on the sidewalks or streets. These fragments are tagged with a sound chip circuit, allowing the voice of the fragment to be heard as it is transported back to the exhibition space. Once within the built environment, the fragments will be reconfigured and integrated into the office space, engaging in a dialogue with the architectural components and visitors to the space. The collected fragments create a chaotic and uncontrolled chorus of overlapping voices. Long Haul re-imagines a relationship to nature within the context of the built environment. The project examines an architecture that attempts to supply the needs of its inhabitants and draws a comparison to the natural world’s effort to survive within the c

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2005 ••• Archive

Exhibition Information

Text by: Jayne Wark

Rita McKeough: An Ethics of Compassion.

Rita McKeough has been producing installations and performances across Canada since 1979. During the 1980s she worked primarily with installations, and has concentrated since 1991 on performance projects, that have often taken place within installation settings. McKeough’s performance works are often large, even operatic, in scale, yet are structured so as to create a paradoxically intimate experience for the audience. As Barbara Lounder observed in writing about McKeough’s 1996 performance, Dancing on a Plate, her technique of positioning viewers within sets or installations, in close proximity to the performers, can be related to the tradition of postmodern dance that emanated from the Judson Dance Theatre in New York in the late 1960s, whereby the strict and safe division of audience and dancer was done away with. In McKeough’s performances, this intimacy is heightened by the plenitude of sensorial elements, including complex spatial