Jamie Isenstein: Will Return is an exhibition, an occasion, and a publication. For the past fifteen years, Portland native and Reed College alumna Jamie Isenstein has created objects, drawings, mixed-media sculptures, and installations that engage the artist’s body as an artistic medium—a subject of humor, theatricality, and historical representation. In keeping with the tragicomic slapstick of turn-of-the-century vaudeville, Isenstein explores the subjectivity of the marginalized individual—the bit-player, the human prop, the butt of the joke, the wisenheimer who gets the last laugh. At times, Isenstein’s humor veers toward the bittersweet and the melancholic. The jokes and wordplay embedded in her work materialize the pain of others, confronting us with life’s most essential predicaments: mortality, particularly. Perhaps more than any other object, Isenstein uses the common “Will Return” sign as a means for expanding the relationship between artist and spectator, and artist and artwork. The sign embodies the inevitable moment when both artist and spectator will no longer return. Or will they? Like all good magicians, Isenstein keeps her secrets close, so don’t ask.