Rita McKeough

Magical and achingly tender tour de force asks us to listen to other beings on a troubled planet.

by

“We need to talk to you. We need your help.” 

This plea from the most outspoken of long-stemmed roses calls you closer, drawing you into darkness is as deep as the darkness is, the marvelous, achingly tender immersive installation and performance that is Calgary artist Rita McKeough’s latest tour de force. 

Her multimedia installation, on view until May 31 in the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre, summarizes her concerns as an artist, a feminist and an environmental activist, while responding to the biosphere’s critical condition by creating a magical dimension where plants and animals can voice their plight. 

McKeough plays with space and scale, moving viewers through cramped underground bunkers and large industrial sites. It’s almost as if you descend and shrink, like Alice in Wonderland, until you’re at eye level with the ferns. McKeough deepens the illusion by suffusing the gallery with sounds, some recorded and triggered by your arrival, others incessantly chugging away. 

Consider the entire installation as symphonic: the overture takes place in the atrium outside the gallery, with a garden of supersize long-stemmed roses. Leaning over their curved felt petals, you hear voices coming from the tiny speakers hidden within. Half the flowers weep, while the other half sing consolingly: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.”

McKeough, who teaches at the Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary and is a 2009 recipient of a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, views components of her installations as performers. After making art for 45 years, she has a ready cast of characters she can enlist for new projects.

Twenty years ago, for instance, her handcrafted roses filled the air with subversive feminist laughter as part of an outdoor performance, Tower of Silence, which disrupted history at a former Trappist monastery in St. Norbert, Man., where women were barred and monks lived under the rule of silence. The defiant roses have kept their fabulous looks, but now they grieve. If you knew them in earlier days, their lamentation in Banff is even more poignant. 

McKeough transforms the front section of the gallery into a dark, subterranean world that's split into two chambers by a wood-framed structure. Look down as you enter and you see light patterning the floor with fern fronds. Look up and you see a low ceiling permeated by small fern-shaped openings that reveal glimpses of an army of miniaturized construction cranes. A thunderous sound track and video projections of falling debris make it feel like you're in a bunker that’s under assault. 

Off to one side, images of wild animals – a moose, a bighorn sheep and others – are projected onto the walls, as if they are gazing out from dark tunnels. A wolf gently shakes its head in reproach. 

Visitors can overhear a walkie-talkie conversation between a bear and a cranberry bush. They assess the damage, wondering why machines are digging overhead. “There is something down here in this darkness that they really want,” says one. Coal? Gold? Food? Us? They agree it’s time for a show of force.

McKeough responds to the ecosystems and human histories of the locales where she creates her work. The cranberry bush character was developed for this show’s first iteration, dig as deep as the darkness, last year at the Richmond Art Gallery in Metro Vancouver, where cranberry bushes abound. The bear is a nod to Banff.

Sword ferns, found in both Alberta and British Columbia, play an important role in the narrative, joining forces to battle the machines and detoxify the soil. You encounter them first positioned like fallen soldiers in camp cots in a sort of a battlefield hospice. At the opening, Darren the Squirrel, another character from McKeough’s past, tenderly cares for them.

The value of work – both emotional labour and the labour-intensive making of sculptural components, often in multiples – is at the heart of McKeough’s practice. Along with recycling earlier work, she also amends her creative soil with what is aptly described as “composting the feminist archive” by curator Jacqueline Bell, who helped mount the complex show with Mimmo Maiolo, one of Canada’s most experienced preparators.

McKeough’s narrative culminates in her evocation of a vast space that resembles some sort of resource-extraction field. Scaffold-like towers that house slowly rising dark cylinders are arranged in a grid. Each is a compelling kinetic sculpture in its own right; together they create a daunting, yet mysterious, enterprise. The construction cranes heard from below on entering are now clearly visible. They are repurposed from Wilderment, a major installation lamenting the fast pace of urban development that McKeough created for the 2010 Alberta Biennial.

Some 400 sword ferns, laser-cut from stiff green felt and zigzag stitched onto wire, stand guard atop each tower. Triggered by motion, the towers’ cylinders rise in waves. Startling forms emerge from the ground: not coal or oil, but ceramic claws, horns and beaks. Amidst the mechanical drone comes a call to action: a manifesto voiced by the ferns and accompanied by the swell of cello and bass, as well as a soprano’s elegiac refrain. 

This stunning exhibition, like McKeough’s singular career, defies labels. Artist, teacher, mentor and musician, she gives profound meaning to words like practice, community and engagement. Here, enjoying the fruits of her long and productive relationship with the Banff Centre, she is at the peak of her powers. 

In a sense, McKeough is closing a circle. One of her earliest installations, Skeletal Development, constructed outside the Walter Phillips Gallery in 1983, foresaw a time when humans would run out of building supplies and need to dig up the “bones” of demolished apartments in order to reuse them for new structures.

This new exhibition revisits the theme of humanity’s appetite for consumption in a more expansive way, with its immersive, cinematic and, at times, interactive invitation to listen to other beings that share the Earth. The first step in building our capacity for empathy is to listen. Hope might follow. ■ 

Rita McKeough: darkness is as deep as the darkness is runs from Feb. 1 to May 31, 2020 at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.

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Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity

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