KERRY TRIBE

“Tribe’s conceptually charged work is distinct...her rigorously crafted installations offer a reconciliation between film as ‘film’ and film as ‘cinema’ through an ongoing investigation into the structuring of time.” - Gloria Sutton in Kerry Tribe: Recent History.

H.M. is a two-channel presentation of a single film based on the true story of an anonymous, memory-impaired man, the famous amnesiac known in scientific literature only as “Patient H.M.” In 1953, when he was 27 years old, H.M. underwent experimental brain surgery intended to alleviate his epilepsy. The unintended result was a radical and persistent amnesia. Though he was no longer able to make lasting memories, his short-term recall, lasting about 20 seconds, remained intact. He lived anonymously in this condition for more than half a century until his death on December 2, 2008, in a Connecticut nursing home. His case is widely credited with revolutionizing our understanding of the organization of human memory.

H.M. consists of a single 16mm film that plays through two adjacent synchronized projectors with a 20 second delay between them, so the viewer sees two simultaneous side-by-side projections of two different parts of the same reel of film. The structure of the installation and the nature of the material together produce a sensation of mnemonic dissonance much like that experienced by Patient H.M.

The roughly 18-minute loop weaves together reenacted, documentary, found and animated elements and lies somewhere between an experimental documentary and an independent narrative film. The exhibition will also include related photographs, letterpress prints and drawings.

Kerry Tribe’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; Kunst Werke, Berlin; and SMAK, Gent. She was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2005-2006 and received her MFA from UCLA in 2002.