The Lion's Share

Rita McKeough

Rita McKeough is a multimedia installation and performance artist who has taught and exhibited throughout Canada since the late 1970s. Her experience as a radio station disc jockey and drummer for bands like The Confidence Band, Demi Monde, The Permuters, led to her introduction of sound elements in her elaborate installations and later to the development of electronic and mechanical objects in interactive environments. Although she resists a didactic mode of political address, McKeough works from a feminist perspective on various social issues. For the multimedia performance installation Outskirts (2003), McKeough dressed in motorcycle gear and for seventeen days was dragged by a vehicle across the gallery space of the Owens Art Gallery (Sackville, N.B.), where it slammed into walls and divided urban and rural sections in a poignant commentary on the race against suburban sprawl. Like in many of her previous works, McKeough worked with a team of musicians and technicians to produce an elaborate multi-part installation that deals with the relation of the body to architectural spaces and social planning. Considered by Lis van Berkel as “one of Canada’s most successful long-term performance artists,” her work has been featured in Radio Rethink: Essays on Art, Sound and Transmission (Banff Centre for the Arts, 1993) and Caught in the Act: Canadian Women in Performance (YYZ Books, 2004). (ML)  

From Interview with Rita McKeough in the text Performance, [Performance] and Performers, (Vol. 1), Conversations by Bruce Barber, Edited by Marc James Leger, Published by YYZ Books 

Images courtesy of Aminah Jomha, M. Hutchinson, and Doris McCarthy