Among its many characters, Los Angeles-based artist Kerry Tribe’s sharp and riveting video at SFMOMA, Standardized Patient, features a woman in a doctor’s office who isn’t quite sure why she’s there.
Standardized Patient tracks doctors-in-training interacting with “standardized patients”: actors portraying characters with specific motivations, family backgrounds, personalities, and sets of symptoms. The camera follows the doctors as they discern the actor-patients’ ailments and communicate a treatment plan.