DEEP HORSE TEXTS invited five artists and their chosen human companions to spend a day with a horse in 2021–22. These artists sought out ranches, trail-rides, barns, and horse rescues where they could ride, brush, feed, or just be alongside horses. Each two-person group was given a pre-loaded camera, and the invitation to do whatever they wanted with this time.
What we, the interlopers of these DEEP HORSE ENCOUNTERS, are given to experience, are the contact sheets from each roll of film. These images function less as documentation than as a reminder that time spent with a horse exists outside of what can be held in an image.
Rita McKeough is an installation and performance artist based in the Treaty 7 region of Southern Alberta, on the traditional territories of the Blackfoot Confederacy (Siksika, Kainai, Piikani), the Tsuut’ina, the Îyâxe Nakoda Nations, and the Métis Nation (Region 3). Her work incorporates audio, electronics, and mechanical performing objects. Since the late ’70s, McKeough has consistently worked from a feminist perspective, and her recent work focuses on the environmental impacts of oil production and demonstrates her desire to use sound to create a rhythmic voice of agency and empathy to articulate forces of resistance in the natural world. McKeough’s work has been featured in Caught in the Act: An Anthology of Performance Art by Canadian Women (YYZ Books, 2004) and Rita McKeough: Works (EMMEDIA, TRUCK Contemporary Art and M:ST Performative Art, 2018). McKeough feels fortunate to have the support and assistance of her community to produce her work. (excerpt by Diana Sherlock)