![\"Rita](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/08\/98-CR13-IMG2-IM_Morelli_McKEOUGH_2298_CMYK_resultat.jpg\")
<\/strong>Works<\/em>, cover, 2018.
Photo : Marc Hutchinson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Rita McKeough: Works documents the artist\u2019s collaborative artistic practice starting in the late 1970s through a series of essays, interviews, and stories; colour photographs and sketches; and a vinyl record containing audio excerpts from previous works. Edited by Diana Sherlock, this monograph is a unique object cataloguing and revisiting the artist\u2019s prodigious career exhibiting in seminal Canadian artist-run centres, performance festivals, universities, galleries, and museums. The publication outlines the depth of her practice as it fluidly combines visual and media arts, performance, installation, and sound. From Halifax to Vancouver, her work resonates with ecological and socio-political concerns, foregrounding contemporary issues with urgency. Disarmingly humorous yet poignantly gut-wrenching, her interventions are immersive and captivating. As described by Areum Kim, with Veins, one of the most recent projects featured in the catalogue, McKeough creates \u201can environment where multiple perspectives collide and critical conversations might take place.\u201d In Johanna Householder\u2019s essay she names this ability to develop complex events as an \u201cempathic loop, literally bringing the viewer inside the work.\u201d McKeough binds spaces, objects, and individuals together, generating community and intimacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A recurrent theme across the publication is McKeough\u2019s particular care for fostering collaborative environments for marginalized people(s), specifically by establishing intergenerational, queer, feminist spaces. While the artist\u2019s own voice is represented through reprinted sketches and conversations with Sherlock and the artist Cheryl L\u2019Hirondelle, insight into McKeough\u2019s process-driven pedagogy is articulated by the contributors\u2019 accounts of their personal experiences. Echoed throughout is her unabashed commitment to making difficult and uncompromising work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Depicted by Jude Major as a \u201cdynamo,\u201d by Eli D. Campanaro as a \u201cfearless warrior,\u201d and by Deirdre Logue as someone for whom there is \u201cno holding back,\u201d McKeough queers prescribed gender roles inscribed by domestic architecture. The publication repeatedly illuminates how her aesthetic, the product of a highly skilled craftswoman, a visionary ensemble-maker, and a theoretically savvy mind, generates events rich in labour, ideas, and audio-visual content. For this reason, analytical descriptions of McKeough\u2019s oeuvre like Anthea Black\u2019s reading of slipping by (2005) or Elizabeth Diggon\u2019s reflections on tender (2015) work in tandem with the poetic, speculative worldbuilding contributions of Mary Scott and Jeanne Randolph. The accompanying record, a standalone item that complements the imagery of the catalogue with acoustic texture, effectively remixes voices, instruments, and noises from original installations. Like the body of work itself, Rita McKeough: Works feels like an ongoing collaborative project\u200a\u2014\u200aa conduit between the artist, her concepts, and the viewer\u200a\u2014\u200aand an invitation to witness and join an ongoing revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n