Speak, Memory, 2012

The Power Plant presents a major solo exhibition of work by Los Angeles-based artist Kerry Tribe. Contextualizing a new project through a selection of past works, the exhibition Speak, Memory offers insight into Tribe’s ongoing interest in memory and the history and apparatus of film. Engaging image, text and sound, Tribe’s work considers cognition, typically revealing its content through a kind of structural storytelling. Often working with multiple projections and timed loops, her use of the literal mechanics of the moving image suggests that the medium is capable of mirroring processes of comprehension, memory and doubt. 

 

Seeing its Canadian premiere here at The Power Plant, Tribe’s new project There Will Be ________ (2012) is a film that approaches the history of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills. In the late 1920s, the owner of the mansion and his personal assistant were found murdered on-site. The investigation ended abruptly and a cover-up was suspected. The family eventually moved out and by the 1950s the house was a regular Hollywood filming location. Shot on location at the mansion, Tribe’s work uses actors in 20s costume to perform diverging accounts of the events leading up to the murder. All of the dialogue is appropriated from scenes of feature films that have been shot at the mansion. Although these lines are restaged and taken out of their original narrative context, Tribe’s work evokes a sense of familiarity or déjà vu.

The installation of There Will Be ________ will be accompanied by two older works: H.M. (2009) and Parnassius mnemosyne (2010), and by her performance Critical Mass (2010–11), which will be staged in conjunction with the 25th Images Festival.

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