Jo Anne Robinson (arrest #7042); J.W. Bonner (arrest #7057); Rev. M. L. King Jr. (arrest #7089); Audrey Belle;Langford (arrest #7080); Rosa Parks (arrest #7053); Willie James Kemp (arrest #7104); L.R. Bennett (arrest #7022); Ralph D. Abernathy (arrest #7018)

2008 (all)

oil on canvas and toner on silk (all)

Dimensions variable

McCallum & Tarry worked as an artist duo from 1996 to 2012. As a white

man and Black woman also engaging in the work of a marriage, Bradley

McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry explored issues of race, power, and identity

through multimedia installations that are at once unmistakable, careful, and

mystifying. Images relating to these concepts are recontextualized or, often,

amputated bizarrely from any context at all, showing only the emotional truth

of events which often become weighed down and confused as landscapes

for equivocation and debate. Notions held as truth-- the primacy of white-

ness, the brutality of law and law enforcement-- are made apparent in their

quiet violence.

McCallum and Tarry’s 2008 series Evidence of Things Not Seen presents

layered depictions of Civil Rights protestors arrested for their part in the 1956

Bus Boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama. Their images, taken at the moment

of their arrest, are rendered in each work twice. Full-color oil paintings,

honorary and dignified, sit within the works’ simple white frame, while the

original black-and-white mugshot, serving as objective evidence for a system

meant to dehumanize, is stretched overtop the frame on translucent silk. The

complex relationship of these two images-- these two historical understand-

ings-- shudders and unfurls as a viewer walks around them: sometimes

lining up, sometimes at odds, never able to exist independent of each other.

McCallum and Tarry invite a moment of reflection under the gaze of the

subjects, about whom we know so much and so little, pointing quietly to the

nuance of memory, power, and choice: concepts in which we too-often

remain comfortably, blindly certain.

-Nola Williams-Riseng