Researching Richard Kerr

He was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas. He received a B.A. in history from the University of Oregon and started graduate work there too. Kerr had a 32-year career with the CIA which included involvement in the retaliatory bombing raids against Libya in 1986 and culminated with key roles in managing U.S. intelligence related to the near nuclear stand-off between India and Pakistan in 1990 and the attempted coup against Boris Yeltsin in August, 1991.

In 1991, Kerr was presented with the Presidential Citizens Medal by President George H. W. Bush.

From 1996 to 2002, "Dick" Kerr also served on the Board of Directors for the Aegis Research Corporation of Rosslyn and later Falls Church, Virginia. He continues to serve on corporate boards and is a compliance observer of the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

Kerr left high school without graduating to pursue a career as a professional hockey player. Eventually, he discovered photography which led him to study filmmaking. Kerr's early films were associated with the "Escarpment School," a group of avant-garde filmmakers that began at Sheridan College in Ontario in the late 1970s. Others in the School included Philip Hoffman, Steve Sanguedolce, Gary Popovich, Carl Brown and Louise Lebeau.

In the late 1980s Kerr made various trips to the American Southwest to shoot black and white film in the desert and in Los Angeles, material that later would lead to two of his most important films Last Days of Contrition (1988), and Cruel Rhythm (1991).

In the mid 1990s, Kerr's practice began including installation. He was interested in exploring the materiality of film. He started working with digital video "sketching" and "motion picture weaving." His weaving involves gathering old Hollywood feature films, trailers and filmstrips of his own outtakes. The material is often chemically altered through studio processes before being woven and sealed between layers of glass that is then mounted in custom fluorescent back-lit light boxes. Kerr's motion picture weavings deal with formal concerns of material and composition through creating visual abstractions of the original cinematic representations.