Kerry Tribe (b. 1973) is an artist based in Los Angeles and Berlin. She has had solo exhibitions at Art 28 Statements, Basel; REC, Berlin; Galerie Masonneuve, Paris; Southern Exposure, San Francisco; and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions. Her work has also been shown at Kunst-Werke Berlin; The Generali Foundation, Vienna; ARTSPACE, Auckland; 36th Edition International Film Festival, Rotterdam; Kunsternus Hus, Oslo; SMAK, Ghent; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; The Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach; and Mercer Union, Toronto. Tribe was the 2005-2006 Guna S. Mundheim Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and in 2005 received a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award. She received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002, and was a Whitney Independent Study Program Fellow from 1997-98.
KERRY TRIBE
December 1–January 19, 2008
Kerry Tribe’s filmic practice attends to the formal operations of her chosen media, often deploying it to investigate the subject of memory. Subjectivity and its representation has been a consistent theme throughout her work that engages film’s systems of looping, repetition and duration. Tribe’s work complicates the construction of narrative time from the viewer’s real time experience, often exploring the gray areas between the authentic and the scripted, and the collective and the individual.
Tribe’s Near Miss is the second work in a trilogy dealing with the phenomenology of memory. It is a five-minute-long filmic attempt to reenact an event the artist experienced a decade ago. In each of Near Miss’ three nearly identical “takes,” a scene is enacted as seen through the windshield of a car in a nighttime snowstorm. The view through the car’s windshield fills the projection screen, the windshield wipers franticly keeping the view clear. From the passenger position, the viewer witnesses the apparent passing of road signage as the car follows blurry taillights. In every take, the car ultimately swerves and spins out, finally coming to a stop. At the point that the car stops, the image cuts to black and another take begins.
Near Miss can be understood as another examination by Tribe in how to communicate the subjective experience. The film is accompanied by a set photograph and a changing series of textual accounts of the original event as understood by members of the film’s production team.
Artspeak would like to thank the Vancouver Foundation and Ramada Limited Downtown for their support of this project.
Artist Talk
KERRY TRIBE
December 1, 2007
Artist talk presented in conjunction with Near Miss.