Kerry Tribe, There Will Be ________, 2012. Pre-production still (Murder). Courtesy the artist and 1301PE, Los Angeles.
March 24 – June 3, 2012
Opening: Friday, March 23, 8–11 p.m.
THE POWER PLANT CONTEMPORARY ART GALLERY
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, ON M5J 2G8
T: 416.973.4949
E: info@thepowerplant.org
thepowerplant.org
Hours: Tues–Sun 12–6, Sat 12–8, Open holiday Mondays
Curator: Melanie O’Brian
Notions of memory and its re-enactment and representation have been important to contemporary art in the past few years, and artist Kerry Tribe’s contribution to this discussion is sophisticated in terms of its beauty, intelligence, rigorous craft, ambitious scale, and play with the media of film and video to say something new about these subjects. For more than a decade, Tribe’s film and video works have dealt with the significance of time and how it is remembered. Typically, her projects match personal and cultural constructions of memory against ones rooted in fact and neurology, generating a cinematic event that forces viewers to simulate and analyze cognitive experiences at the same time, offering a transfixing subjective experience.
Contextualizing a new project through a selection of past works, 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 at The Power Plant, Tribe’s new film, There Will Be ________ (2012), 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 deaths, with all of the dialogue appropriated from scenes of feature films that have been shot at the mansion.
The installation of There Will Be ________ will be accompanied by two older works, which will both be exhibited for the first time in Canada: H.M. (2009) and Parnassius mnemosyne (2010). A performance of Critical Mass (2010-11), staged in conjunction with the 25th Images Festival, will also accompany the installation.
H.M. – March 13, 2012
Critical Mass / Live performance – April 18, 2012
THIS EXHIBITION IS MADE POSSIBLE BY SUPPORT DONORS ELISA NUYTEN & DAVID DIME.