Japanese Couple

Barbara Bloom’s focus on minute detail stems from her
interest in the implicit, in possible meanings—hers is a
“detective gaze.” Bloom employs ambiguity and suggestion
to investigate how we bestow value and meaning onto
images and objects and how we view, remember, collect,
and consume them. Here a folding screen partially cordons
off a single, shadowy photograph of a Japanese couple. The
screen alternately shields the picture from view or invites
intimate, even private engagement. The work emphasizes
the physicality in the act of seeing and renders the viewer
complicit, not merely as voyeurs but as full participants in
an exchange between the subject and object of spectatorship.
“Can we,” Bloom asks, “think of images or objects
as the recipients of a gaze, aware of our looking at them,
affected by our looking?”