Caren Golden Fine Art is pleased to present Bloodlines, a solo exhibition by Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry. Known as McCallum & Tarry, this conceptual art team is recognized for work that investigates social issues and race relations. In video, photography, painting and sculpture, their work bears witness to the inequities and social injustices pervasive in society both yesterday and today.

For their first solo exhibition with the gallery, McCallum & Tarry will present Whitewash, a series of black and white paintings based on iconic and associative photographic images from the 50’s and 60’s that reference the civil rights movement. Culled from the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and other historical sources, the images are first rendered in oil on canvas, and again, slightly off register, on a sheer silk overlay. The overall effect appears hazy and somewhat out-of-focus and explores the disjunctive space between photography and memory.

McCallum & Tarry will also present Exchange, a new video in which the interracial team simultaneously performs blood transfusions on one another. Exchange alludes to the historic “One Drop Rule” in which a person with as little as one drop of black blood in their heritage was considered “colored.” Originally endorsed as a way to increase the slave population in the United States, the rule directly lead to laws prohibiting miscegenation and remained a common practice in the US until as late as 1967. Moving from intimacy to violence, McCallum & Tarry enact a ritual of blood transfer that has both symbolic and literal meaning to them as a mixed race couple.

Bradley McCallum & Jacqueline Tarry’s work has been widely exhibited with solo exhibitions throughout the United States, Beijing and Tokyo and praised in numerous publications including The New York Times, Time Out New York, The Washington Post, Art in America, ArtForum, Frieze, and Sculpture magazine. Their videos will be featured at the Loop Art Fair in Barcelona at the end of May, and Bearing, a new photographic series, is currently on view at the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA. Whitewash, a hardcover catalog of McCallum & Tarry’s recent work, was published in 2006.