From Michael Ames, "Kindler's dreams take wing at Anne Reed"
The Idaho Mountain Express, Feb 7, 2006"

In Judith Kindler's solo show, "The Dreams," little birds seem to be everywhere, and their intentions are unclear.

As their creator, Kindler does not jump to defend them. Rather, she admits to inviting them into "The Dreams," a body of work nearly two years in the making, precisely for their unpredictable ways.

"The birds fulfill for me what the human figure does," she said, noting the birds' propensity for intelligent, yet mischievous behavior in "The Dreams."

In the large-scale encaustic works, Kindler's birds can be seen as either benign guests—such as when they perch atop a stack of crumpets—or malevolent little intruders, ready to untie precariously dangling glass jars and bottles. They never fly, but instead seem to be in a state of perpetual loitering.

In "Dream 138," the birds take on a more overtly insidious nature as they stand sentry over a small boy who has found his way behind the bars of a birdcage. Or have the birds trapped him?

The themes raised by Kindler's dreamscapes are, like dreams themselves, fittingly ambiguous. In the spirit of the greatest surrealists, Kindler brings her formidable painting and drawing talents to bear on "The Dreams." (She studied painting and sculpture at Kent State in the late 1960s and, yes, she "was literally there," when the school's infamous National Guard shootings took place.)

Working from large-scale printouts of digital photographs, she creates breathtaking recreations of the smallest detail of an everyday object, such as cloth, paper or a shaving brush. Always contrasted against dark backgrounds, Kindler has combined the Renaissance-era technique of "chiaroscuro" with the modern benefits of digital photography and printing. The marriage of the two has a way of enshrining banal objects in classically surreal, meditative states of grandeur.(...)"