Balance: the term elicits a range of meanings. Of grace, proportion, and harmony. Of stability, equilibrium, and measure. Of incompletion - something left hanging in the balance - and power relations. Of something owed; a residue. Of sanity and order. Its absence connotes hesitation, uncertainty, risk and precariousness. Things left unresolved and suspended. Something gone awry. The irruption of the uncanny in daily life; a psychic disturbance.

How do we negotiatie the fragile balance that is life itself, the dual experience of plentitude and loss that is our deepest legacy as human beings? Rachel Friedberg confronts her past with tender reverence, encrypting messages in her encaustic grounds and collaged fragments that are drawn from the archives of her most private memories. Her paintings are monuments to the eclipse of time, to life's unpredictable rhythmn, continuous yet punctuated by defining moments. On the silent stages of her deferred narratives, wedged between the grided lines of text in the "Notebook Series," and in the frozen depths of the "White Paintings," Friedberg relates her story, as fragments of the past shift in and out of focus - ciphers of thought and feeling that the artist seeks to possess and understand.