Under a Sky of Flawless Blue (Gide)

Working with a wide variety of media including photography, film, installation, and arrangements dealing with the economy of meaning and value in objects and images, Barbara Bloom examines the mechanisms of perception and investigates viewers’ experiences since the 1970s. Bloom’s focus on “framing” as a metaphor and her interest in the ephemeral quality of traces deal with memory and the experience of seeing in their relationship with materiality. In her works, she often deals with the concepts of fading out of existence, or the inability to experience existence by using text, linguistic expression, and books.

In her series entitled "Works for the Blind", where Bloom furthers her research through images, digital prints, and specially-woven carpets, the texts are written in Braille, which constitutes a constraint on experiencing the work as a whole. Blind people capable of deciphering the alphabet and reading the text won’t be able to perceive the work visually, whereas most of the people who are able to see the works won’t be able to read the textual extracts that Bloom borrowed from leading authors in the history of literature and thought, such as André Gide, Roland Barthes, Hannah Arendt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Text in Braille: “Under a sky of flawless blue; during the twelve days… there has not been a single cloud nor the slightest diminution of sunshine… the weather has been of crystalline clearness for the last two months. I am neither sad nor cheerful; the air here fills one with a kind of vague excitement and induces a state as far removed from cheerfulness as it is from sorrow; perhaps it is happiness.”

Translated by Dorothy Bussy
André Gide, The Immoralist (New York City: Penguin Random House, 1958).