For the exhibition RSVP, the gallery is filled with abstracted furniture- like forms that serve as display cases for objects. Barbara Bloom invites the visitor to experience the rooms as an exhibition space and also as the semblance of a home – one filled with imagined historical guests grouped around a piano, toasting at a table, conversing on the sofas, browsing in the library, playing cards, etc. One might think of the exhibition as a visit to a party in this home unaffected by time and space. We can eavesdrop on conversations between improbable combinations of figures who never actually met in real life

Each area of the residence is accompanied by open book pages with evocative written passages suggesting conversations between people like George Gershwin, Sigmund Freud, Amy Winehouse, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Nabokov, Albert Einstein, Joan Didion, Arnold Schoenberg …From the rich associations between the texts, the objects, and their display, Bloom develops personae and their possible dialogues, arguments, discussions, and debates.

The rooms’ furniture-like cases here are filled with objects. Here we are offered an opportunity to concentrate not only on the singular item, but to observe the relationships between these many entities, and the meanings implicit in their combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts; their positioning engenders meaning and discussions that reverberate and ricochet off of each other.