A recent exhibition at one of my favorite galleries in Chelsea, Caren Golden, featured 2006 and 2007 works of the conceptual duo, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. I was formerly unfamiliar with their works, but was attracted through the window by the images I saw on the wall. Really the content of the wall pieces, which were painted reproductions of civil rights era documentary photography weren't very innovative by themselves. I was essentially looking at photographs that are a part of the collective memory and consciousness, photographs though that carry a profound sense of painful progressive change in American and African American History. So these images are on the wall, but then McCallum and Tarry did innovate a bit by pulling a 'screen' of silk over the front of the painting, floating it approx. two inches above the surface of the paintings. The 'screens' were printed or painted with the image in the painting beneath, but some figures were off register and some more than others. For my eye, the effect was illusionistic so that the photographs ceased to be static and historical. Now the figures were animated again probably with some knowledge of op art and cognitive science to thank for the effect.
The figures whose screens were more off register appeared to move more quickly. By re-activating a static historical space , McCallum and Tarry seem to ask us to wonder if the content in the images might live today, or how does the evidence of history actively resonate in the present.
In the backroom, a video piece entitled Exchange records a blood transfusion between the artists, a mixed race couple. According to the press release, the piece was a
reference to the 'One Drop Rule', an antiquated notion that if a person has one drop of black blood in them, they are colored people. The idea that it could be that easy is an intriguing one for me, and apparently for McCallum as well. But the social justice element of the performance and video was not the most salient aspect of it for me. Instead, I was drawn to the intimacy between partners, creative partners, and how deep and profound the process of sharing an artistic identity must be. The film was shot,
I'm assuming at 60 frames per second, this makes the image move twice as slowly as is natural, allowing the viewer to linger on the sensuality of the needle prick, and the kinetic reality of the pressures of blood in our veins, willing to flow out of us if given an opportunity. In this piece, the blood of one unites with the blood of the other, making them seemingly connected as an organism. Issues of race or sex or politics or history dissolve in the presence of two people opening their veins to one another.
