Artist Statement for Cara Judea Alhadeff
The Alchemy of Intimacy
My models simultaneously splay their bodies into the distance, like a smear or echo of memory, and compress themselves into the tightness of the present-moment, the foreground. I develop my work by finding natural and architectural sites that I relate to human gestures and psychological states. I then choreograph scenes set within these environments. Although the photographs are consciously constructed, the relationships are equally born out of an improvised collaboration in which the physics of touch, gravity, and balance establish an unfolding performance. What I see through the camera lens is my reality. The photograph shows the viewer what is happening in front of the camera; nothing is manipulated during the developing or printing process.
I arrange the space, objects, and bodies (including my own) in such a way that blurs the lines that separate them. This luminescent excess inhabits both the domestic and the animalistic. The characters become hybrids of machine and animal who populate dream-like worlds. The quotidian in relation to the sensual sets up a ritualistic narrative--the strewn collision of bodies and space is simultaneously purposeful and haphazard. Through a carnal visual language, these polymorphic bodies are engaged in ambiguous ceremonies. My photographs explore the body as a membrane between sensuality and restraint, surrender and resistance. My intention is to disrupt the distinction between the interior and exterior of both psychological and physical expriences. They illuminate a call and response between anxiety and beauty: Anxiety in the moment of recognizing the familiar within the unfamiliar—feeling a connection with the other, yet clinging to a separate identification; beauty in the moment of responsiveness to our undeniable connectedness.