The exhibit features the work of two artists, Micaela Amato from Pennsylvania, and Cara Judea Alhadeff from California. The fact that they are mother and daughter, meeting from opposite coasts in Chicago evokes in itself images of knowing and intimacy. While their content and style are very different, their motivations are remarkably synchronous. Like the outrageous line, "my mother, my daughter, my sister, myself" from the 1970's film Chinatown, they see and hear themselves in each other to the point where their identities slip and slide. Both artists images portray juxtapositions of contradictory narrative spaces that are dreamlike, even hallucinatory.

Micaela Amato
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. Her work explores cultural and physical healing and asks us to consider how our imaginations dictate our perceptions of the messiness of the human body and psyche in society.

The exhibition also includes Amato's three dimensional neon lighted "knots" and bouquet of wax flowers scattered across the wall amongst her photographs. Included too is the life sized cast glass figure with multiple heads and limbs from hybrids of self portraiture and that of her daughter with ancient ancestors from Morocco, Spain, Turquia and India.

Amato currently teaches art at Pennsylvania State University. She is widely recognized for her prolific exhibitions, reviews, articles and related professional activities. Her work appears in several catalogues and books, among them, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American Art, National Endowment Archive Project, Art in America Annual. Amato's work appears in over 40 public and private collections worldwide.

Cara Judea Alhadeff
Alhadeff, like Amato, implicates her own body into her visual narratives, establishing actual and fictional realities that deal with social exile and transformation. Blurring the distinction between interior and exterior psychological, physical and architectural spaces, her color photographs distort scale and incorporate unexpected juxtapositions of bodies with organic and synthetic materials

Using exaggerated colors, forms and textures, she saturates her large format photographs with precarious playfulness. Her arrangement of human models, body parts and man made objects evoke possibilities of disturbing lushness. Through her c-print and streaming video-loop photographs, Alhadeff constructs simultaneous realities in scenarios that will elicit the viewerís curiosity, apprehension and desire.

Censored in Pennsylvania and California, her work which often includes genitalia, erupts with intimacy. Her models splay their bodies into the distance while their images are compressed into the tightness of the foreground. Nothing is manipulated during the developing or printing process, the result a touching human, sometimes unnerving lushness.

Alhadeff is a graduate of Pennsylvania State University. She is the recipient of numerous grants and awards; the most recent in 2001, a four month Residency at Jon Sims Center for the Arts in California. Her work appears in numerous private collections and at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

For more information, visit her website at www.carajudea.com

Hybrid identity
Both artists exhibit a consciousness of organized excess — a confrontation between hyperbole and precision. They present hybrid identities. As Mark Twain observed, ìa person cannot depend on the eyes when imagination is out of focus.î In an attempt to sharpen that focus, both artists ask their viewers to participate in an exchange that roots the viewer in the sensual fluidity of perception.