At Atlanta gallery, a marriage of artistry

Bottom line: An intriguing collaboration between husband and wife artists that draws its power from combining their individual strengths.

Husband and wife artists Micah and Whitney Stansell are both fans of storytelling, they just like to tell them in very different ways.

Micah, whose primary medium is video, tends toward the mythic and sweeping, like Terrence Malick on a much smaller scale. His video installations in public spaces and gallery settings are imbued with mood and gravitas.

Whitney, on the other hand, is far more intimate and personal in her storytelling, often using a delicate, ethereal drawing and painting style to sketch stories rooted in her own family history, rich with intrigue and stories half-told, cloaked in legend and secrecy.

Though both artists are known and respected for their individual bodies of work, together the Stansells are something a little extra, a double threat combining Micah’s epic approach and Whitney’s poetic, closely observed details. In their second collaborative exhibition at Whitespace Gallery “Scarlet Air,” the couple are showing a video work also entitled “Scarlet Air,” projected on three screens in one of the Whitespace gallery rooms, as well as a series of photographs and stills drawn from that video.

Suggesting lobby movie stills previewing the feature film to come, the gallery’s first room is hung with images of a trio of brunettes whose work at a thrift store seems laced with unhappiness. Larger photographs zero in on imagery that seems loaded with crime novel significance: a dog-eared, grimy copy of “East of Eden” splayed out on a bed, a canary-yellow rotary dial telephone like you’d find in some fleabag Florida motel and a vintage Walkman loaded with an audio cassette of Debbie Gibson’s 1989 “Electric Youth.” Potent images suggest a sense of menace: an overbearing customer inspecting the thrift store wares or a thermos spilling coffee on a mattress. Like so many of Whitney’s drawings, there is the suggestion of something slightly menacing beneath the surface. The images hum with a sense of disquiet and disappointment.

While Whitney’s voice encourages quiet contemplation and questions about how these images fit together, Micah’s vision is more immersive, more inclined to astound. Sitting on a stool and watching the couple’s video unfold is like being pulled along on a journey — IMAX with an art house attitude — as the camera moves down a long country road or roams through winter cornfields. The central figure in this unfolding drama is one of those pale brunettes whose eyes peek out beneath heavy bangs, who floats in a boat on a lake with a friend, clocks in at her thrift store job or walks in the woods with a boy. Voice-over narration written by Georgia Tech literature professor John Harkey and spoken by Whitney gives a sense of the character’s inner vantage at times, but also a more omniscient, narrator’s perspective offering insight into what we see on the screen, and its importance or insignificance. As in the photographs, certain details seem unsettling, like a decaying wooden barn that comes crashing to the ground. But the voice-over narration reassures, “It is not a metaphor, it is just work to be done,” pulling back to reveal the farmers laboring to dismantle the structure.

Micah says the couple’s video style in “Scarlet Air” is inspired by Eighties films — an era when both of the Stansells watched their older siblings in the throes of adolescence. And while “Scarlet Air” initially seems more conceptual than “Sixteen Candles,” or “Say Anything,” the signposts are there: the moment when two young lovers stare at each other, caught in a moment of blissed-out early love; the having-fun montage where a group of impish Value Village employees race around the store in a shopping cart employed as a go-cart. The video cleverly references such conventions, without the lethal blow of cuteness or irony.

With skill and grace, the Stansells take subjects like the American landscape, being young, work and the poetry of ordinary blue-collar life in stride and give it dignity. And, it seems, there may be no real mystery at the heart of all of those vignettes captured in the still images dominating the gallery’s front room. Those individual, foreboding stills are revealed in the video to be the simple components of life: moments of solitude, doubt, simple pleasures and beginnings and endings. Just the stuff of life, after all.