REVIEW

"Another Country"

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Through June 7. 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; noon-5 p.m. Saturdays. Prices: $3,450-$12,000. Kiang Gallery, 1011-A Marietta St. 404-892-5477, www.kiang-gallery.com.

Bottom line: A powerful meditation on our racial history and the fraught relationships between history, truth, memory and denial.

Jacqueline Tarry and husband Bradley McCallum have devoted their decade of artistic collaboration to examining race in America, from the intimate scale of their interracial marriage to the epic scope of history.

"Another Country," their provocative exhibition at Kiang Gallery, does both.

The New York couple inject each other with their blood in the 2006 video "Exchange," a solemn ritual that symbolically nullifies the stigma of interracial marriage by invoking the historic "one drop rule." The paintings that fill the rest of the gallery address the civil rights era. Especially timely now during commemorations of the 40th anniversary of the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the series includes many depictions of Atlanta events.

In contrast to "Exchange" —- which is tough to watch, especially for the needle- or blood-phobic —- the paintings project a seductive, ghostly beauty. Yet, in their own way, they, too, are hard to see.

Each consists of an oil-painted copy of a historic photograph, overlaid with yet another copy —- a silkscreen deliberately placed off-register from the first.

The concept grew out of research the pair undertook for a memorial to Malcolm X in Manhattan's Central Park. Sifting through photographic archives to gather material, they got to wondering, says McCallum, to what extent our memory holds to truth."

Not enough, as suggested by the form they chose. The sense of remove from the original and the confusion caused by the halo image mimic the way images (and memories) fade and change from the passage of time and —- to judge from the show's title —- our denial of our racial history. (In James Baldwin's novel "Another Country," willful forgetting is a major theme.)

Throughout their careers, McCallum and Tarry have made it their task to combat what she calls "historical amnesia." The paintings' ingenious format both states the problem and attempts to rectify it. They reframe the photos —- enlarging, doubling, blurring —- to make you look again.

And to shake complacency. As McCallum explains, "The eye wants to resolve the two images, to make them whole, but it's futile."

It's a symbol, he says, that "the struggles of the civil rights era aren't resolved either."