"Whitewash"
Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry
Opening: April 14th from 3 PM. Exhibition runs until May 13th.
F2 Gallery is pleased to present Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry's first solo exhibition in Beijing, China. The show will present "Whitewash", a series of paintings, photographs, video and drawings that examine the legacy of power and race in America. As an interracial artistic team (one black, one white), McCallum & Tarry are looking at the indelible memories of racial injustice and the ways that the passage of time attempts to mask these truths. The paintings and drawings in this exhibition present the landscape of racism that lies just below the surface of contemporary society. The imagery is built from photographs taken in the 1960īs that document the brutality of attacks on civil rights protesters as well as the assassinations of civil rights leaders Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King.
Jacqueline Tarry states, "This body of work is about our need to justify our past deeds, to whitewash our nation's sin of slavery and its legacy of racial injustice. We have selected images that resist this softening of history to tell the hard truth." McCallum adds, "the indelible nature of these images bleeds through the surface of the whitewash glaze to examine the intersection of race, memory and photography."
The photographs and video presents the artists self-portrait performance work where through direct action they examine the legacy of race. The most recent work "Cut" is an unsettling self-portrait of the artists cutting each other's hair. This simple act is transformed into a sexually and racially charged, and emotionally complex performance suggesting the cutting of hair as an act of collaboration, dominance and submission, intimacy, punishment and control.
In December 2005, McCallum & Tarry were commissioned to create a public memorial to Malcolm X and Betty Shabazz in New York City that is scheduled for installation in 2007. The photographs taken of the empty chairs scattered on the floor of the Audubon Ballroom following Malcolm X's assassination inspired their proposal and is also the basis for the epic paintings in this exhibition.
McCallum & Tarry are best known for their work "Endurance", a series of life-size color photographs and a video that together document a 26-hour endurance performance by homeless Seattle teenagers. Excerpts of this work will also be on view in the backroom of the gallery during the exhibition.
McCallum & Tarry first visited Beijing in December of 2000 and established a studio in Beijing in 2001. During the past five years they have participated in an ongoing dialogue with emerging artists "Whitewash" continues their commitment to using their artistic voices to address the social and political concerns of our time.
For further information, please call Meng Fan on +86 10 6432 8831 or +86 13488709596. |
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