Silvia Wagensberg’s latest collection of paintings may seem like no more than a compilation of portraits. In fact, it is also a window to the concerns that have been guiding her most recent painting endeavors. For the past six years, Wagensberg has been studying Yiddish at the American Jewish University and at UCLA, something which has also proven to be an exercise in memory and personal history. Shortly after she began taking these lessons, her teacher Miri Koral introduced her to an intriguing Yiddish reading group that she eventually joined. It is from the ranks of this group that she has recruited the subjects of the portraits she has titled “Species of Faces and other Mayses”. These portraits are also loosely based on a collection of essays by Georges Perec called “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces”, a seminal book by the French intellectual and son of Holocaust victims. The word Mayses in the title is Yiddish for “stories”. Born in 1936 in Paris, France, Perec was a member of the famed group Oulipo, which came to define the literary vanguard of 1960s Paris. The group sought to resolve many of language’s shortcomings through unusual experiments involving mostly word play. Somewhat similarly, Wagensberg seeks to understand larger questions of language and communication through a playful examination of everyday gestures and minutia. As Wagensberg put it, the person behind every painting revealed a rich tapestry of experience to which she was anxious to allot her own type of permanence. The group as a whole presented a linguistic challenge to Wagensberg, where she often found herself both as part of a larger effort to try to preserve a language in trouble while the same time she was nearly unable to keep up with the weekly readings and conversations. As she tries to make sense of it all, her choice of subjects and gestures opens a window to a particular human psychology and behavior that may turn out to be larger than her source Yiddish reading group.