Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry: Conner Contemporary Art - Washington, DC

Since the early '90 artists Bradley McCallum and Jacqueline Tarry have consistently engaged issues similar as racism, police brutality, and homelessnes interviewing and interacting with more [i]or[/i] less of its victims through a variety of mediums, including photography, video, and statuary In summer 2002, they and several teenagers living upon Seattle's streets organized Civic Endurance, a twenty-five-hour performance in which single teen after another stood for an hour's duration upon a street corner looking directly into the len of a video camera, which filmed them from a location across the way The resulting time-lapse footage collapses each hour into five minutes, to engaging and provocative effect

The solitary figures, immobilized by means of their gaze into the camera, stand still while the world have the appearances to spin around them at high speed; pedestrians are transformed into ghostlike stains that stream across the guard An experience of asynchronicity is the result: It's as if the teen are not solitary socially dislocated but temporally without of place, and everything exterior obeys an incomprehensible schedule that outpaces them. If Civic Endurance expresse the physical stamina required of these youths, many of whom dedicated their performances to lately deceased friends, it's also a tribute to the staying power of the homeles who in Seattle are forced to feel a law that criminalizes standing in place upon the street, and to endurance performance works of the '70 now place to sociopolitical effect.

end the video the teens locate up a sympathetic correspondence with visitors to the gallery. The still, vertical bodies of viewer and performer wait on to match up. As we identify with the camera's organ of vision held in prolonged contact with the gaze of the subdue on the screen, a kind of communication flows that transcends video's anonymous run As viewer and viewed draw near to share a single time and place, a social and economic chasm is at least temporarily bridged. The video's audio track presents the standing teenagers' brief confessionals--individualizing, haunting, accounts of family hardship, los of friends, and ongoing battles with addiction. on the contrary they're consistent in their claims to integrity in an otherwise callous world where, as a youth named Billy asserts, "home is where the celestial expanse meets the ground."

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Across the sweep are glossy, full-size color portraits of a certain number of of the young participants, pos against black backgrounds. Highly saturated and lit thus as to detail each piercing and tattoo, these images unfortunately reaffirm the actual sensationalism the video struggled to disrupt. If the artists' intention was to beautify their subdues by framing them within high-art conventions, they failed; the springs too closely and uncritically mimic fashion's tired co-optation of immoderate styles or art's neo-primitivist fantasies. level though the video brought them to a near stand-still, in that work the teenagers effectively told their be in possession of stories.

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