ART PAPERS, July/August 2008 BRADLEY MCCALLUM + JACQUELINE TARRY ATLANTA By Susan Richmond For several years now, Brooklyn-based Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry have mined photographic archives as a way to explore race relations in the U.S. Evidencing what Okwui Enwezor, after Jacques Derrida, has recently called "archive fever," their work encourages viewers to consider the mediating role played by images and visual archives in the production of memory and history. As an interracial couple, the two artists also use the archive to gain personal insights into past and contemporary forms of racism. For their recent exhibition Another Country, they created images based on Civil Rights-era photographs, culling many of their sources from the Atlanta History Center to give the show a local inflection [Kiang Gallery; February 29-June 7, 2008]. McCallum and Tarry always repurpose their photographic sources into stylized oil paintings, which are then overlaid with a stretched piece of translucent silk bearing an ink reproduction of the original. A slight misalignment between the painted and printed surfaces produces an optical doubling that forces sustained attention. The effect, a distancing of the subject matter, becomes a metaphor for the elusive and sometimes inaccurate processes of recollection. So does McCallum and Tarry's combination of iconic and unfamiliar images, such as a wall of police mug shots of the civil rights workers arrested during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956. While the event is well known, the specific individuals are all but forgotten today. On the one hand, their inclusion here could be regarded as a simple injunction "not to forget" the era's rich history. But McCallum and Tarry's act of repurposing is as interruptive as it is reiterative, its selection of the past as arbitrarily determined as the public archives upon which it is based. The show also features a video and Bloodlines, 2007, custom-made wallpaper patterned after microscopic scans of McCallum and Tarry's red blood cells and symbols from their respective family crests. Several of the exhibition's more violent scenes of racial strife hang over Bloodlines. As such, the wallpaper's domestic and familial associations conjure the home as an important site in the production and dissemination of racial discourse. On a similar note, the video Exchange, 2007, shows the artists giving each other blood transfusions. Donned in identical white shirts, they swap soft caresses and reassuring glances as they prepare to insert needles into each other's arms. The camera moves back and forth between them, creating a tightly sequenced, seductive, and jarring choreography. The transfusion invokes the archaic "one-drop rule," by which black racial identity was legally determined in the U.S. for several generations. Once their blood starts to flow, McCallum and Tarry clasp hands. The gesture, which highlights the contrast of their skin tones, evokes the prohibition of interracial relationships under the "one-drop rule," while the literal exchange of blood ironically subverts the notion of racial purity on which the rule was premised. The inclusion of references specific to Atlanta's racial past gives viewers ample opportunity to reflect on the production of local histories. However, the preponderance of images from this region also recalls the ease with which America displaces its racist ideologies and practices onto Southern soil. Unarguably, Atlanta has been the site of intense racial tension in the past, but Another Country does rub this history against the grain. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 19, 2008 Tower setting powerful for '60s video montage by Catherine Fox The project: "Within Our Gates," a three-channel video installation inside a century-old water tower by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. The back story: The sound-and image piece stands, like much of these artists' work, at the intersection of race and memory. Even the location is symbolic: The Old Fourth Ward has an important place in the civil rights movement, and the 100 foot-tall tower is a relic of the cotton industry. The video is drawn from news footage of the civil rights movement and its opponents. Be sure to: Stop and listen to the speech in the afternoon. You might surmise that the stirring words about protecting liberty and freedom date from 1776. In fact, and ironically, Alabama Gov. George Wallace delivered the speech in the 1960s in response to desegregation. It is a telling counterpoint to the revolution depicted inside, where scenes of marches in particular suggest the tides of change and the force of will that eventually drowned out the words and ways of Wallace and his ilk. See it because: It's the most sophisticated and important public art project in Atlanta in recent memory. To stand inside this unexpectedly cathedral-like space and watch images flicker on the scarred surface of the interior as the insistent rhythms and passionate voices of gospel/ protest music resound around you is a powerful experience. The 411: "Within Our Gates" runs 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. today: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday; at Auburn Avenue) and Irwin Street. Free. A project of Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 28, 2008 Artistic Couple Turns Abandoned Structure Into Reflection on Civil Rights By Drew Jubera After scouting sites all over Atlanta for the public art project they'd been commissioned to create, Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry both were knocked out by a 100-foot-tall abandoned concrete water tower in the Old Fourth Ward. "It was kind of this undiscovered jewel in the backyard of the city," McCallum said. But staring up at it from the patchy grass out of which it seemed to sprout, the two had different notions about what to do with it. McCallum first envisioned something displayed on the tower's century-old exterior. Tarry's reaction: "You don't expect me to climb up there, do you? As much as I'm attracted to it, I'm not climbing up that ladder!" Yet it didn't take long for the husband-and-wife artist team to agree on a concept: archival video and audio of the civil rights movement displayed on the tower's interior and viewed from a plat­form constructed above a shallow pool of water. The result: "Within Our Gates," a high-profile, signature exhibit for the 10th annual Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a monthlong festival of exhibitions, lectures and other events throughout the metro area and beyond that opens officially this week. Both in their 40s, McCallum and Tarry have come to similar aesthetic accords many times during their decade-long artistic partnership. "The most important part of us working together is the trust,? Tarry said from the couple's Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment, where they live with their 5-year-old son. "Even though I might say, 'No way, Jose, I'm not doing that,' I never 100 percent dismiss him and his idea. I always chew on it and come back to it." McCallum added, "There are times when we're both moving in different direc­tions. We try to allow each other to do that, with the sense that we'll come back to common ground." The results have often prompted charged, even con­troversial, responses from viewers and public officials. In their 2006 video "Exchange," the couple ?he's white, she's black ? swap each other's blood through transfusions to sub­vert the historic "One Drop Rule" of racial purity. In 2001, they set up photographs of black worshippers from a nearby church in the pews of a predominantly white church, invoking the spirit of the black congregants who in 1820 were forbidden to sit on the main floor. A 2000 project in New York, "Witness: Perspectives on Police Violence," included five emergency call boxes with speakers that played the recorded voices of brutality victims and their families. Then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani panned it. "They have this ability to interrogate complicated ideas that we often don't have a vocabulary to talk about," said Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, director of the Spelman Museum of Fine Art. A group exhibit at the Spelman Museum last year included "Cut," the couple's symbolic and penetrating video of them wordlessly cutting each other's hair. Brownlee said it prompted more discussion than any other piece in the exhibit. It was also the only piece in the exhibit that the museum purchased. "When it comes to cutting -edge, contemporary art, they push boundaries that really play with our comfort levels," Brownlee said. Atlanta Celebrates Photography, a nonprofit dedicated to the photographic arts, has featured public projects at past festivals. But for its 10th edition, Executive Director Amy Miller said, it wanted "something with teeth, that was socially responsible." Project curator Lisa Kurzner approached McCallum and Tarry after hearing them lecture last year at a local gallery about their work, including the 2003 video "Endurance," a poetically stark chronicle of homelessness in Seattle. McCallum and Tarry saw in Atlanta Celebrates Photography an opportunity to expand on their most recent work, which grew out of research for a memorial to Malcolm X: oil-painted copies of civil rights-era photographs, overlaid with silkscreen copies of the same photos. "We were open to just about anything," McCallum said. "But it was when we discovered the water tower that things became exciting." The long-abandoned tower, blocks from the King Center, once provided water for a nearby cotton compress warehouse, now converted into Studioplex, a mixed-use artist center. The tower itself seemed converted into shelter for the homeless. The circular interior was furnished with a ratty couch, fire pits, bottles. But shafts of light also poured from small win­dows around the 70-foot tall, rotundalike ceiling. The pebbled walls were colored by leeching minerals. Booming acoustics magnified the faintest sound. "The minute they walked in they said, 'This is the place,' " Kurzner said. "It was like being in the Chartres Cathedral." The artists spent days going through the vast film, TV and radio archives at the University of Georgia. They avoided footage of more recognizable leaders from the civil rights era. They concentrated instead on faces, crowds, interactions. "We're probably the first artists who've used the archive in this manner," McCallum said. The title, "Within Our Gates," is taken from the 1920 film by black director Oscar Micheaux, a kind of African-American response to D.W. Griffith's silent classic "Birth of a Nation," which glorified the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. "The idea of borrowing the title 'Within Our Gates' is saying, ' OK, this our backyard. This is within the community. This is the kind of turbulence and struggle that was seeded here, " McCallum said. "It's not trying to pres­ent itself as a documentary of the Fourth Ward. It's gaining inspiration from this com­munity as a kind of seeding place for the movement." Tarry sees that inspiration as "more of a meditation on asking questions. Watching people passionately involved in political decisions and asking, 'Am I involving myself in the discourse of my day? Am I carrying on the legacy of the past?' "Hopefully that question will be continually asked."