Bruce Barber Interviews Rita

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 slamming itslammed into walls and dividing 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)

Bruce Barber: You began your art practice as a printmaker, artist bookmaker and musician. In the late 1970s at NSCAD when we first met as students in the MFA Program you had adopted an extraordinary alter ego, Smudge McGuff, and you were producing whimsical lithographs based upon your fascination with lost woolly mittens and cookies. How did you become involved in producing performance works?

Rita McKeough: I don’t think I would call myself a bookmaker but a sculptor, printmaker and musician. Performance and installation became part of my practice as I began to link the music and art works. I was a DJ at a community-based radio station as well.

During my B.A. I majored in sculpture and printmaking. My printmaking work had very elaborate narratives that motivated and structured the work. I was invited to have my first solo exhibition at Dandelion Gallery, an artist run centre, in Calgary in 1977. I felt uncomfortable with the formality of the gallery so I transformed the space into a representation of the images in the print works. I created an environment within which I felt the viewer had a more complex and more interesting experience of the narratives within the imagery. The viewers inhabited the work and I positioned myself as a link between the characters in the narratives and the viewers. As a performer I became a narrator in part and also a character in the narrative. I could answer questions and supply more information in a role that maintained the fictional or fanciful nature of the content.