Kerry Tribe: Double

In Kerry Tribe’s single-channel video work Double, five women who nominally resemble one another reflect on subjects ranging from their impressions of Los Angeles to the project they are currently working on – apparently the very project in which they appear.  Each of these young women is, in fact, an actor who responded to a casting call for the part of a “video artist” with a physical description of Tribe.  In front of the camera, they improvise monologues based on whatever impressions they were able to glean from a brief, off-camera interview with the artist. The work addresses an issue with which most human beings have grappled at some point: how the world perceives and interprets them, their lives, and their work.

Kerry Tribe was born in 1973 in Boston, MA and lives and works in Los Angeles.  Tribe’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; The Power Plant, Toronto; Modern Art, Oxford; and Camden Arts Centre, London.  It has been included in significant group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.  The artist has been the recipient of a Presidential Residency on the Future of the Arts at Stanford University, a Herb Alpert Award, a Creative Capital Grant, and a USA Artists Award.  Tribe’s work is in the public collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the Hammer, and the Generali Foundation among other institutions.