The artist discusses her use of mirrors and their ‘destabilizing’ effects
Evan Moffitt: Mirrors recur throughout your work. What interests you about them?
Barbara Bloom: I’m constantly working in both two and three dimensions, back and forth. Mirrors are two-dimensional objects, but they reflect the third dimension. When a person looks at a mirror in an artwork, they see themselves looking at the work. I’m trying to call awareness to the active sense of looking.
EM: Is your understanding of active looking informed by modernism, which centres on the way artworks situate the viewer?
BB: I’m interested in worlds within worlds, references within references – Charlie Kaufman, Jorge Luis Borges. The first artists who interested me were those making phenomenological work about the nature of seeing, like Robert Irwin and Eric Orr. When you look at Irwin’s dot paintings and then look away, they leave an afterimage. I remember reading Lawrence Weschler’s description o