Encaustic held both formal and metaphorical possibilities for the artist, providing a painted surface that resisted visual penetration and suggesting an undifferentiated space, optically shallow but symbolically full.

Within these luminous fields, Friedberg embedded photographic fragments. Her combination of the encaustic ground and the photographic quotations - unarticulated space and precise details - reflects her desire to find "a physical entity that mirrors thoughts, momentarily suspended." Many of the photographs that appear in these works were culled from books and magazines.

The photographs operate here as second-order signs. Their original contexts have been several times distanced, first through Friedberg's selection of the photographs, then through their removal from mass culture into a personal archive, and, finally, through their retrieval from the archive into a painting.