Japanese Couple

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