Rachel Friedberg's work of the past thirty-five years maps the trajectory of a life deeply lived. In the cloistered spaces of her early assemblages, in the interstices of her photocollages, and in the hushed silence of her encaustic paintings. Friedberg (b. 1929) has embedded her jubilant and painful history as a woman, a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother. At once deeply personal and inscrutable, her visual poetry speaks to the dreams, promises, and psychic isolation that form the core of our shared humanity.

The images and texts that comprise this volume seek to establish a dialogue between the artist and her most intimate experiences, and the viewer and her work. The transaction of meaning that occurs in this forum is open and fluid - a series of encounters that have no beginning or end, no proscribed interpretation or definitive boundaries. Like a fugue, harmonized according to the laws of counterpoint, a dynamic asymmetry characterizes all of Friedberg's work, a fragile balance that is poised in exquisite tension.