January 18–May 4, 2008

Photographer,
designer, and installation artist Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) has built her
career out of questioning appearances, exploring the desire for
possessions, and commenting on the act of collecting. This
retrospective will explore all aspects of her oeuvre, and includes
works from past multi-media installations and newly made pieces, as
well as objects from her vast personal archives of ephemera and
advertisements. In some cases, Bloom revisits previous installations
and adds new elements, resisting the delineation between past and
present in her work. She often integrates her photographs with
furniture to create compelling scenes, as with the installation Greed
(1988) from the ICP collection, comprised of a chair, an empty frame,
and her own photograph of a museum gallery showing a guard in a chair.
An example of one of her "collections" is a complete set of Vladimir
Nabokov's writings, with all the book covers redesigned by Bloom. This
refers not only to herself as collector, and Nabokov as collector (he
obsessively collected his own books), but herself as artist.

The Collections of Barbara Bloom
is organized by the International Center of Photography and is an
expansion of a project developed as part of Bloom's Wexner Art Center
Residency Award in 1998. It will be accompanied by an ambitious, fully
illustrated catalogue published by ICP/Steidl.

John Baldessari