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As if seen through a looking glass, the anomalous space of The Barren Womb, reminiscent of the dream sequences in Persian miniatures, anticipates by three decades the recasting of subjectivity in state of the art cinema where hybrid, hyper-managed images are disembodied and reassembled in an immersion of digitally reconstructed 3-D space.

The faces of Rappaport's women protagonists in The Barren Womb hold our gaze dispite the hallucinatory screen of timelessness embedding them within the scraped-down, flattened, faded fresco-like soft-focus consuming the distinction of foreground, middle, and background; just as reliance on our saturated, photo-generated, and mediated world of virtual space has changed expectations in the veracity of the real and makes all our experiences illusionary.

With our reality being altered drastically by the experience of the wide aperture of photographic receptivity in which not all reflections emphasize a clear accounting of every piece of minutia as if specimens in a scientific reliuary, we enter into the slippage at variance to an absolute model - one that is comfortable at being lost from what we once understood as verisimilitude. And it is here where we fall down the rabbit hole to another aesthesis which operates within a vastly different landscape of the imagination.

As such, The Barren Womb, like Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland is unabashedly a fiction, as are all models of reality, but here pushing the parameters of our perception of being towards a media induced sensation of floating in an omnipresent whirl of partially defined phenomenology - an unlocatable slipstream of indeterminate passage within the psychic density radiating around us - the dream ushering in the impenetable labyrinth of the new wilderness of our self-discovery that once was Nature herself.

- Richard Rappaport, Philip Pearlstein - 'The Barren Womb'. Chapter 17, "Portraits & Passages", www.richard-rappaport.net.