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.