Artists' Statement

Thicker than Water is an exhibition of photographs, sculpture, and sound. The show combines the work of Cara Judea Alhadeff and Micaela Amato--daughter and mother. When Alhadeff was a child, Amato developed paintings based on her daughter's drawings. When Alhadeff began to photograph 20 years later, her images were saturated with the rich, halluncinatory qualities she saw in her mother's work. Their language about experience, interpretation and its implications has become intricately intertwined. While their content and style are very different, their motivations are remarkably synchronous. As Sephardic/Spanish Jews, they are frequently not only unable or unwilling to pass in a white, western culture, but also unable to fit into the standard notion of what is a Jew (those of Eastern European origin). This state of being in-between has shaped and directed how and what they create. Alhadeff and Amato's works blur the distinction between interior and exterior psychological, physical, and architectural spaces. Sculptural and photographic characters are suspended in states of silence or meditation, while their immediate environment presses in around them. Intimate and troubled relationships proliferate among their characters' complex identities.

In some works, Amato integrates her father's black and white photographs and negatives from the 1920's-40's with smeared text from her own short stories. Part of an earlier body of work, her "portrait physiognomies" ( both cast glass and composite cibachrome heads) represent multiple races and ethnicities. The forms and images become hybrids of self-portraiture with ancestors from Morocco, Spain, Turkey, and India. In the project-room installation, Amato's ghost-like bouquets of white wax flowers are strewn across walls in a darkened space intermittently illuminated by Alhadeff's video and their overlapping voices.

While Amato's work explores cultural and physical healing, Alhadeff plays with how society's standards of normalcy dictate our understanding of the human body. Alhadeff, like Amato, implicates her own body into her visual narratives which deal with personal and social exile and transformation. Alhadeff's color photographs distort the viewer's perception of scale. She juxtaposes bodies and body parts with organic and synthetic materials. In her photographs, exhibited here as c-prints and video-loop, Alhadeff constructs oppositional realities by setting up scenarios that may elicit the viewer's curiosity, apprehension, and desire.

Mother and daughter share an intuitive commitment to the sensual fluidity of perception. Both artists thrive on a consciousness of organized excess--a tactile confrontation between hyperbole and precision. Through their often exaggerated use of color and reference to natural forms, Alhadeff and Amato's work explores juxtapositions of dream-like, contradictory narratives. They play with the illusory distinctions between us and them: the familiar and the unfamiliar, what is supposedly comfortable and what puts us on edge.