Jaclyn Kain makes black-and-white photographs whose smudgy surfaces and wispy lines could convince you they're charcoal drawings. Her unusual photographic technique suits her intentions for her images. She's interested in ambiguity, in making work whose narrative and vintage are not clearly stated.

"To me, they're like parts of a bigger story, and I see them all as connected in some way. How they're connected hasn't made itself apparent to me yet," Kain says. "I saw them first in my head, but for a while I didn't know how to make them look like that - distant and far away and not of any particular time or place."

Searching for a means to find this "lost period," she happened upon her method of tearing apart paper prints and using them as negatives. In July, 2002, Kain was interviewed about her process by Louise Kennedy, who described in the Boston Globe "softly blurred and textured images that look like the beginning of a story - or the last wisp of a dream." Her comments are echoed by Kain. "The moment you wake up in the morning and you remember a dream, and you can't quite remember it, but you remember little pieces - that's what I'm interested in."

A 1999 graduate of Simmons College, Kain won a Trustman Fellowship from the studio art department there, which underwrote travel to Japan. This is her first solo exhibition.

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