is everybody else alright?
installation

Ryan Tebo, visiting Assistant Professor in MassArt’s Film/ Video department is constantly probing the relationship between personal identity and ethics as a ever-changing social process.  His newest installation, Is everybody else alright? explores the empathetic shifts in conscience of Robert F. Kennedy as observed through the public lens of the 1960’s. Tebo challenges notions of separation between public and private self, and the role of film and print media in shaping the larger understanding of an individual’s morality.

In 1953 RFK was appointed as Senator Joseph McCarthy’s assistant counsel to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, supporting McCarthy’s anti-communist scaremongering.  By 1968, and his candidacy for president, RFK had become a champion of civil and human rights for the US and the world.  Tebo attempts to trace the shift in personal ethics behind this ideological sea change.  Using popular film and print documents, Tebo searches for moments of genuine empathy in his life as a public figure.  A massive zoetrope-style structure of projection screens are back-lit from within by images of RFK.  Each of the twelve screens displays one frame of one second from a moment in RFK’s public life; the audience circles the structure, observing the subtle shifts in movement and expression that can exist in one second’s interaction.  The sheer amount of time allowed for each instant leaves the viewer to ponder their own ethical relationship to history, politics and public life.  The structure is complemented by a series of smaller works focusing on appropriated documents – interviews, filmstrips and speech excerpts.  The most affecting of these is Ryan as RFK, a one-channel video of the artist recreating RFK’s historic climb of Mt Kennedy after his brother’s assassination.  Tebo instead supposedly climbs Mt Tebo in Washington, planting a homemade family flag at the peak.  The video stands independent from the larger installation, yet completely reframes the content of the work. It reveals the very nature of Tebo’s investigation; political affiliation, like any ideological position we take up is extremely personal, and tied to our ethical make-up.  It is only natural to attempt to empathize with and seek the human from political figures who stand as the icons of that ideology.    
      -- text from Godine Family Gallery,
         where the piece was installed April 2009