Extrapolating on events from her life, the artist's favored subjects became women's experience in and of the world, from love, family, and the domestic sphere to disease, coping with loss, and ultimately the inevitability of death. Using her purposely awkward style, complete with written banners and borders and decorative, painted frames, Sigler conjures up intimate interiors or suburban backyards in which household objects or a shadow figure called "the Lady" serve as stand-ins for real people. Typically, too, her set pieces register the emotional aftermath rather than the cause of a dramatic action.

From 1985 onward, she has focused on the complex issues surrounding breast cancer-its incident rates, causes, and treatments; its fears, rages, and uncertainties. A long-term survivor of the disease to which her mother and grandmother have already succumbed, Sigler creates works that are emotionally relentless for all their sweet coloring and engaging style. In what can best be described as a coda to the 1992-93 series Breast Cancer Journal: Walking with the Ghosts of Our Grandmothers, the painting To Kiss the Spirits: Now This Is What It Is Really Like presents the artist's most hopeful expressions to date.

At the lower register of the painting, small, toylike brick and timber houses softly glow under their porch and street lamps, while the upper two-thirds of the canvas pays homage to Vincent Van Gogh's Starry Night. At the center of the picture, bathed in celestial light, the silhouetted "Lady" rises effortlessly along a fluted staircase, changing color from purple through rose to white as her arms slowly lift upward to become an angel's wings. Freed from the mundane cares of this small patch of suburban ground, Sigler envisions the end of a most difficult physical, psychological, and emotional journey and the achievement of a long-awaited state of grace.