Taking film as her subject, Judith Eisler photographs frozen frames from her television. The resulting photographs become the literal source for her paintings, but the real subject is harder to determine.

While there is usually the residue of a recognizable image, her subject is more likely the degrees of removal from `reality’ to which the image is subjected in the subsequent translations to film, then video, then to a television screen and to still film. The artist effects one final translation of the image to oil on canvas.

The paintings themselves supersede the actual subjects. In Judith Eisler’s virtuosic hand, each painting becomes a vertiginous construction of shifting light, pulsating figure ground relationships, and indeterminate masses and voids all bathed in a dream-like haze.

“The word `rapt’ describes intensified states of being that can be embodied by interior reflection and subjective desire, ‘Rapt’ also refers to being physically snatched away. These recent paintings present figures that are engaged, busy, and elusive. The ambiguous spaces they inhabit emerge and dissolve in tension between representation and abstraction. Background, foreground and figure combine and recombine in open perceptual conditions. Narrative and stasis, motion and isolation, are implied, conjectured, and baffled.” (Judith Eisler)