Advertisement

Art Art & Books

Memory bank

KERRY TRIBE at the Power Plant (231 Queens Quay West) to June 3. 416-973-4949. See listing. Rating: NNN


Time, memory and narrative can play endless tricks on us. Kerry Tribe, an artist from Los Angeles, uses video and film to plumb the labyrinth of memory as it’s skewed and distorted through rumour, falsehood or physical mishap.

There Will Be ___ delves into the 1929 Greystone Mansion Murders, when oil heir Ned Doheny and his secretary, Hugh Plunkett, were found dead – a murder-suicide – in his bedroom in the Beverly Hills mansion.

Five scenarios enact what might have happened between Ned, Hugh and Ned’s wife, Lucy, several of them involving the enduring rumour that the two men were lovers. Handsomely recreated with a full cast and sleek production values, the segments are joined by the simple conjunction “or” to show that any one of the death scenes is as plausible as another. The film runs in a perpetual loop you recognize you’ve come full circle when characters start repeating themselves.

Many brilliant films skewer their own narrative logic (Memento and Pulp Fiction come to mind), but for all its brilliant detail, this one feels a bit coldly enigmatic and too clever by half.

Patient H.M., an older work by Tribe, is warmer and more human-scale. Its anonymous subject underwent experimental brain surgery to stop his epileptic seizures, but the operation left him without the ability to form long-term memories.

A two-channel installation broadcasts his story in 20-second segments, the average length of H.M.’s recall ability. The cognitive dissonance of his condition is thus cleverly imposed on the viewer, recreating the baffling narrative of a man who must make sense of things over and over again.

Her use of sophisticated concepts and techniques makes Tribe part of a generation of artists distancing themselves from a public perception of video art as black-and-white footage of studio artists in unitards and instead moving it toward the richness of cinema. Is the trend a success? Too soon to say, but Tribe’s work is compelling.

art@nowtoronto.com

Advertisement

Exclusive content and events straight to your inbox

Subscribe to our Newsletter

This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

By signing up, I agree to receive emails from Now Toronto and to the Privacy Policy and Terms & Conditions.