Randy Matusow
Unbroken Bonds: Mothers and Daughters
Randy Matusow examines the most delicate and encompassing of relationships in this exhibition of her black and white photographs, her 1st solo show in NYC. She has the uncanny ability to reveal the resinations emanating between her subjects. She gets past the public face to a familiarity, even glimpses into private emotions. Sitting around kitchen tables over coffee or posed in living rooms, laundromats and backyards, these women respond to the photographer in an open and inviting way: inhibited poses have melted into real interaction. The relationships and attachments are as chartable as geography. We sense the moments surrounding the snap. Each framed instant invites us in to get acquainted with her subjects, like cinema, and the lives and situations begin to flesh out. That she's touched the lives of these people is flagrant in the way warmth or chilly affectation is prompted.
One photo sings out the chilling distance between the female members of a "well-off" family. Standing physically apart in a well-dusted living room large enough to, they're so far uptown they're in Connecticut (as the trimmed gardens through a window reveals). In another shot, a young daughter is snapped in the midst of a kitchen table hug while mom has eyes closed and head tilted towards heaven. The next two generations of moms (on the other side of a doily, coffee and pie) are recognizably in the midst of that gentle intimacy shared only by people who grew up in the same household. This is a personal journalism. A close 2-head shot of an older woman and her middle-aged daughter has as much info as a Bergman movie. A flood of feelings are expressed in the instant of Ms. Matusow's image-grab.
A full range of ethnic groups and class situations are here exposed. Like an emancipating sociologist, this artist has entered the homes of citizens all around NYC and the boroughs and come back from her visits with these celebratory and enhanced images that trip up the magic in the mother-daughter bond long enough for us to glimpse it.
(Cover, February 1987)