Artist visits Hanes Arts Center as part of guest lecture series

Visiting artist Kerry Tribe invited attendees Tuesday night to walk through a virtual hippocampus, composed of photography and installations, to explore memory.

As a part of the Hanes Visiting Artist lecture series, up-and-coming multimedia artist Tribe discussed her mind-bending work Tuesday in Hanes Art Center.

Tribe lectured on three of her works from the past 10 years before answering audience questions.

She showed clips from her works “H.M.,” “Greystone” and “Here & Elsewhere.”

“I really enjoy doing these talks,” Tribe said. “Every time I get in front of a new audience, it’s a chance to think on my feet about what I’ve been doing.”

Tribe explores the nature of memory through her installations. She said she often works with multiple projections and timed loops to mirror how memory functions in the brain.

Cary Levine, an art professor who helped organize the lecture, said Tribe was chosen because students might not be exposed to her work otherwise.

“She’s at a point in her career where she’s really emerging, and we like to identify artists who are doing interesting work that’s relevant for our students,” Levine said.

Levine said Tribe’s work is not only relevant to art and art history students, but also to students of all majors.

“We try to pick artists that are doing things that are a little out of the ordinary and that would make people think about not only art differently, but about their own disciplines,” Levine said.

Tribe said she started working with memory in her artwork after her grandfather was diagnosed with dementia and her parents had to take care of him.

She said film and video are ideally fitted to address questions surrounding problems about memory.

“We make photographs and videos to document our lives and to keep record of a lot of the most important events, but a lot of the other events in our lives go undocumented,” Tribe said.

“And it seems that media is particularly well-suited to call attention to some of the problems of the representation that requires memory.”

Sabine Gruffat, another art professor who also helped organize the lecture, said many faculty members in the art department also work in video and performance, so Tribe’s work appealed to a lot of the faculty.

But Gruffat said Tribe’s work also represents a different way of telling history.

“It’s not just memory, it’s history,” Gruffat said. “It’s a document — it’s like the idea of an archive. Her work is very cerebral in that way.”

Tribe said she prefers to use photos and video installations in her artwork because she said they accurately depict the world.

“When you take a picture or make a sound recording, or shoot a video, you know that something actually happened in front of the camera,” Tribe said.

“There’s a more direct relationship between that representation and the world outside of us.”

Contact the desk editor at arts@dailytarheel.com.