The broiling blue sea—in archival digital prints under gray to blue mat boards, cut with multiple windows and sealed under framed glass. Perched on easels or hanging on walls, seven composite seascapes decorated a flamboyant Neapolitan palazzo that once housed the family of Edgar Degas. Barbara Bloom staged these delicate vignettes, “The Sea, in Part,” 2024, as if for inspection, as if the room were an art academy, not the piano nobile of an aristocratic family. To see, or not to see, is their double question. Laid out on low, hidden plinths or hanging on the wall were hand-tufted carpets, their woolen color fields shaved down to reveal texts in braille. These cited literary passages on the hues of sea and sky from authors including Raymond Chandler, Gabriel García Márquez, André Gide, James Joyce, Daphne du Maurier, and Haruki Murakami, as well as a meteorological report dating to the day of Bloom’s birth.
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