Rita McKeough: dig as deep as the darkness
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Richmond Art Gallery 180-7700 Minoru Gate, Richmond, British Columbia V6Y 1R9
Rita McKeough, "dig as deep as the darkness," 2018
video still image
A plant is talking to itself, to its own branches, pulsing, and clicking. Ferns stand on guard. Roots stir and move to alert the others. Blueberries to cranberries to bears: clicking, buzzing, vibrating chatter. Excavators dig and bore thousands and thousands of holes into the ground. Tensions build, plants and animals adapt to defend themselves. Conflict is at hand.
Dig as deep as the darkness is a media installation that proposes an abstractive idea of an excavation site that reveals subterranean layers below an imagined city. Sound, video and interactive objects are used to articulate the complexities of relationships of land to land development and the consequences to animal and plant species.The installation offers an immersive and complex experience of the vulnerability of the environment and gives voice to the forces of resistance in the natural world.
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. She uses interactive technologies to represent complex interspecies relationships and to create links between her installations and sound and music practices. McKeough consistently works from a feminist perspective, and her recent work focuses on the environmental impacts of land development and the industrial extraction of natural resources. This recent work 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 Oh Canada (Esker Foundation, 2015). McKeough feels fortunate to have the support and assistance of her friends and community to produce her work.