Spring 2012 Exhibitions at The Power Plant
Opening: 23 March, 8–11 PM
Kerry Tribe: Speak, Memory
24 March–3 June, 2012
Curated by Melanie O’Brian, Curator & Head of Programs
Dissenting Histories: 25 Years of The Power Plant
24 March–3 September, 2012
Curated by Melanie O’Brian, Curator & Head of Programs
231 Queens Quay West
Toronto, Ontario
M5J 2G8 Canada
thepowerplant.org
The Spring season at The Power Plant presents two exhibitions that approach the structures and representations of memory. From cognitive recall to institutional history, the exhibitions present physiological, literary, filmic, and archival approaches to the way we process and consider the past. The first exhibition is 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 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, 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: 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 on April 18. H.M. is a two-channel presentation of a 16mm film based on the true story of an amnesiac known as “Patient H.M.” whose short-term recall lasted about twenty seconds. Tribe’s single film plays through two adjacent synchronized projectors with a twenty-second delay between them. The structure of the installation and the nature of the visual material produce a sensation of mnemonic dissonance much like that experienced by H.M. Parnassius mnemosyne is a 16mm möbius film loop featuring an image of a butterfly wing under a microscope. In the installation, the 16mm film strip is twisted once and its head is spliced to its tail to form a möbius strip. In Critical Mass, Tribe’s first live performance project, she directs two actors in a re-staging of Hollis Frampton’s groundbreaking experimental film of the same name from 1971.
Kerry Tribe (born in Boston, 1973) participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1997–98 and received her MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2002. In 2010–11, her solo exhibition Dead Star Light toured to Arnolfini, Bristol; Modern Art Oxford; and the Camden Arts Centre, London. Tribe’s work has been included in recent group exhibitions at such venues as the Vancouver Art Gallery (2011), the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2011), Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2010), and the Generali Foundation, Vienna (2007), as well as in the 2010 Whitney Biennial, New York. Tribe’s work is represented by 1301PE, Los Angeles.
Support Donors: Elisa Nuyten & David Dime
Dissenting Histories: 25 Years of The Power Plant is a dynamic project designed to exhibit, activate, reconsider, and put into dialogue the gallery’s rich histories. Designed by Markus Miessen, a German architect and writer who has considered the history of the institution at length and contributed to our thinking about participation in public space and design, this space will consider the gallery’s history within local and international contexts, as well as within present spatial and theoretical concerns.
Over an extended period, the space will offer visitors the opportunity to see rotating artist interventions responding to our archives, talks around The Power Plant’s history and special presentations organized around specific thematics such as institutional memory, changing technologies and aesthetics, and Toronto’s contemporary art history. All will take place on-site, making available print materials, video, slides, and other treasures from the archival vaults.
