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November 1, 2012 – Review
Kerry Tribe’s "There Will Be _____"
Kevin McGarry
For more than ten years Kerry Tribe has carefully exploited the medium of film to coax a poetics of contradictions out of human mechanisms like memory, cognition, and perception. These subjective, internal workings are what we rely on to piece together a knowable world, though few would argue that their objective reality is more than shadowy. Through close examinations of how different types of personal truths are constructed, Tribe’s films intone the disquiet and splendor of confronting dichotomies. They usually do so in the guise of documentary, built around individuals who offer first-person narratives, for example, a precocious child answering existential questions, or a senior with short-term memory loss recounting recent events.
Her newest work, There Will Be _____ (2012), on view at 1301PE in Los Angeles as the centerpiece of an exhibition by the same name, is a little more meta—and also a little more pop. The subject is not a person but a story itself: the legend of Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, which at the time of its completion in 1928 was the most expensive home in California. The house was built for the family of an oil tycoon heir, Ned Doheny, Jr., who was found dead in …