and from the New York Times:
Barbara Bloom
GLENN HOROWITZ BOOKSELLER may have earned a little niche in the history of late Conceptual Art. For the centennial of Vladimir Nabokov's birth, Mr. Horowitz invited the artist Barbara Bloom to create an installation using the Nabokov material he had assembled. This included a great number of first editions annotated by the author or inscribed to his wife (and first reader and typist), Vera, almost always with a drawing of a butterfly. There are also nearly two dozen first editions of Nabokov's most famous book, ''Lolita,'' in different languages and with wide-ranging jacket designs.
The resulting installation is a marvel that if carefully attended to can give the viewer/reader the odd sensation of being inside Nabokov's brain, where various passions -- for writing and language, for the collection and study of butterflies, for history and for his wife -- mingle, illuminate and incite one another.
Ms. Bloom, whose interest in Nabokov is longstanding, achieved this with her usual sense of craft, which is more than a little obsessive itself. She has created a rug based on the author's copy of an edition of ''Lolita,'' its green cover heavily annotated. On the computer she designed a font based on Nabokov's handwriting so she can display excerpts from his books on the 3-by-5 cards on which he wrote them. There's even Nabokov wallpaper, dotted with butterflies, snippets of annotated text, corrected copy, deletions and additions as well as the noticeably ribald verses of an unpublished poem version of ''Lolita.''
Under glass are displays of butterflies, including the blues that were Nabokov's particular passion, and arrangements of tiny photographs, many of them doubled into wing-like symmetry.
This is a dizzying show, which may precipitate a reading or rereading of the master's works and is probably most comprehensible when viewed with a magnifying glass, given the fineness of some of the print. Ultimately, one comes away thinking of the pages of Nabokov's open books as the wings of butterflies. He scrutinized both with an intensity that this show makes fantastically manifest.
http://www.huliq.com/45734/exhibiting-collections-barbara-bloom
Exhibiting Collections Of Barbara Bloom
In a world saturated with images, American artist Barbara Bloom makes art that examines the nature of looking. Internationally known for her meticulously crafted installations that combine newly made and appropriated objects andpictures, Bloom challenges conventional perceptions about the meaning of art with wry commentary on the practice of collecting and the desire for possessions.
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As suggested by the title, this exhibition is comprised of—and is a meditation on—collections, gatherings of images, objects, and ideas, which, in a sense, constitute Bloom's autobiography. The exhibition is divided into eleven sections: Doubles, Innuendo, Belief, Blushing, Broken, Framing, Charms, Naming, Songs, Stand Ins, and Reading In. Within these groupings, Bloom engages the viewer in a dialogue on how we construct and are constructed by visual culture. Among the many improbable objects that the artist has made or found are a Playboy magazine in Braille, postage stamps featuring the works of contemporary artists, a chair upholstered with fabric bearing the artist's dental X-rays, a pornographic image printed on a grain of rice, ceramic bowls that have been broken and repaired with gold, and a complete set of Vladimir Nabokov's writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom herself.
Barbara Bloom was born in Los Angeles in 1951; she studied at Bennington College, and with John Baldessari and Robert Irwin at the California Institute of the Arts. For many years she lived and worked in Amsterdam and Berlin. She hasexhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the MAK, Vienna; the Parrish Art Museum, Southhampton, New York; and other international venues, including the Venice Biennale (1988) and documenta X, Kassel, Germany (1997). She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. She currently lives and works in New York City. --www.salvador-dali.org
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