Like a punk rock Lorax, multimedia artist Rita McKeough doesn’t just speak for the trees, she passes them the mic, giving all manner of flora and fauna a chance to voice their concerns in her latest exhibit, Darkness Is As Deep As The Darkness Is, on now at the Banff Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery.
Using audio and video, as well as periodical performance elements to complement her structural scenes, McKeough creates a near-distant future where plants and animals gather together in an underground bunker in a call to arms to reclaim the abandoned mines in a landscape dotted with cranes and extractors – machines that have taken so much, if not everything.
Although stark, dark, and visually unsettling, at its heart, the installation is about the empowerment of community and collaboration, not only stopping to smell the roses but listening to them too.
“It’s the richness and the beauty of the history that’s in the earth. It’s all the animals, and the plants, and the people, and all the bones and histories that are buried there, and the richness of that. There’s a deep, deep darkness in the earth. But also, our desire to take absolutely everything is a darkness,” she says.
For McKeough, who has been an integral part of Calgary’s art scene for nearly 50 years, collaboration and protest are the driving forces of her work, using the gallery and dialogue as a vehicle for social change.
“I was inspired as a young person by working in community radio and by playing in punk bands, and being surrounded by really amazing, supportive, and interesting people that were constantly questioning things around them, and speaking up for situations that were unacceptable. I really took that to heart, and I started to really respond to what I felt were things in society that I couldn’t bear.”
McKeough says she is engaged from a feminist perspective and said her upbringing in the ‘60s still permeates her work and inspires her to champion the displaced, the hidden, and the “people who don’t have the same voice or privilege.”
An intensity of community and collaboration with friends and fellow creatives is also a major influence in McKeough’s work—her own call to arms in a way—to help realize her vision. Counting her own creations among her friends, McKeough extended an “invitation” to some of them to participate in Darkness Is As Deep As The Darkness Is, including Darren the squirrel, the roses, and the cranes used in previous installations. This is in part to offset any disposability in her art.
“As an artist, that footprint is really problematic,” she says.
The give and take of art is shared with the viewer as well. “It’s a reciprocal exchange between the artist and the audience,” says McKeough.
“If we carry on with the excessive extraction and the way that we are damaging landscapes, you can kind of imagine different outcomes and different futures. And in my work, I’m trying to imagine one of those outcomes, and dropping the viewer into it, and asking them to inhabit it temporarily.”
McKeough says that whether the viewer knows anything about art or not, it takes a generosity and willingness to look at something—even if it’s unfamiliar—and be open to experiencing it and trying to find meaning.
“There’s something thrilling and magical about seeing an artwork that completely engages you and transforms you.”