Kerry Tribe

Boston-born, Los Angeles-based video and performance artist Kerry Tribe experiments with the structures of filmmaking, editing, and narrative, particularly through forms that expand upon and pay homage to early video artists of the 1960s and ’70s. A student of both art and semiotics, Tribe uses subtle but loaded signifiers to make deeply textured and layered installations and videos, which are full of symbolic meaning.

In her 2012 short film Greystone, Tribe retells the story of the 1929 murder-suicide of Ned Doheny and his secretary, Hugh Plunket. Tribe’s historical fiction account imagines several different scenarios in which the mysterious event might have occurred; the film's accompanying dialogue, meanwhile, is constructed entirely out of text appropriated from several Hollywood films that were shot on location at Doheny’s Greystone Mansion. This film, like others works from her oeuvre, weaves reality, conceptualism, and symbolism together in a complicated web of meaning.  

Exhibitions of Tribe’s work include shows at the Museum of Modern Art, the Heidelberger Kunstverein, Tate Modern, and Art Basel 38. She was a 2012 Creative Capital Grant recipient, a Guna S. Mundheim Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Awardee.