artist statement

Through my work I am investigating my ancestral history, and in doing so, I attempt to reconcile my sense of exile and reconstruct my identity. My intention is to undermine racist dictums of "purity of blood" and ethnic cleansing that continues to devour our world.

Ants and Luminous Insects, Looking Around She Saw that She was in a Play, and Tijuana Tavolettas, are several works that engage cultural, physical and spiritual healing. Hallucinations-birds in her throat, she was dreaming, is an installation of life-size, cast glass portrait sculptures with hybrid ethnic and racial physiognomies, together with 48"x 60" composite, cibachrome photographs. These images combine contemporary figures within ancient sites in the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas in states of migration. Together, photos and sculptures become a kind of global family that attempts to reduce sectarian hatred and rage.

Cibachrome composite portrait photographs and painted portraits also combine self portraiture or that of my daughter Cara with ancient images: Egyptian/Roman faiyum funerary portraiture found on sarcophagi; religious santos from Mexican folk art; or Velasquez's Infanta. These double portraits have multiple features and hover like ghosts or apparitions. Hybrid "monsters," these exiled characters are spectacles of their own invisibility.

Script from poetic ancient text is often configured in intensely illuminated neon handwriting that speaks in the first person or third person. Three dimensional neon lighted "knots" symbolize the soul, the flow of blood and breath, and internal life energy.

A metaphor for "convivencia," a cultural collaboration of diverse religions and ethnicities in Spain before the Inquisition, my cross-media work celebrates hybridity and calls for a reconciliation of Moslems, Jews, Christians and all other religions in the 21st century.

Micaela Amato