Barbara Bloom incorporates approximately 100 volumes from Nabokov's library into an installation designed at the Glenn Horowitz Bookseller gallery, from April 21 through June 18, 1999: Revised Evidence: Vladimir Nabokov's inscriptions, annotations, corrections, and butterfly descriptions. The name of the exhibition plays off of the title of Nabokov's memoir, Conclusive Evidence, which he later renamed Speak, Memory. Drawing from her extensive knowledge of Nabokov.s life and works, and using a font that replicates his handwriting, Bloom fabricated notecards which present a running commentary in Nabokov's own words on the literature and lepdioptera displayed. Cases of butterflies arranged by Bloom rest in the book shelves above vitrines in which his books are displayed, playing off the themes adumbrated by her selection and arrangement of volumes from the library. A carpet facsimile of the annotated cover of Nabokov's copy of Lolita covers the floor beneath which the book itself hangs in a butterfly case. Butterfly cases with related images and texts pinned in hang on the walls, which are decorated with Nabokov.s hand-drawn butterflies and annotations.

Bloom incorporated her photographs of Nabokov's butterfly catches housed at Cornell University and excerpts from his texts into Never Odd or Even at the Carnegie Museum of Art; into a printed accompaniment to her recent retrospective at the Wexner Center; and in a portfolio for Grand Street, where Howard Halle noted that Bloom's exhibitions echo and expand upon each other: "The bridge between them is a series of books that Bloom has published in lieu of conventional catalogues that would simply document her work, revealing her very nineteenth-century obsession with text as allowing her to elaborate the myriad references that, taken together, compose an overall conceptual frame work for her oeuvre. One such point of reference in Bloom.s recent work has been butterfly collecting.

For the current exhibition, in which she has imagined some of Nabokov.s own cases of butterflies and examined his textual revisitations in tandem with his scientific processes, she has prepared a collection of commemorative stamps elaborating on the themes of the show: collection, recollection, commemoration, memory, mimicry, revision, correction, inscription, dedication, and annotation.

Bloom's work has been shown in major museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (NY), the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem), and the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam). Her honors include the Frederick Weisman Foundation Award, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Due Mille Prize at the Venice Biennale, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Wexner Center Residency Award.

Vladimir Nabokov is a figure unique in literary history. Never before has a such a multi-faceted writer had primary audiences in two languages and four countries. Born in St. Petersburg in 1899 into an intellectually and politically liberal household and educated at Cambridge, he devoted his 16-year emigration in Berlin to developing his gifts as a Russian writer, and became a leader of the Russian literary community. He published poetry, chess problems, criticism, translations (to and from French, English, and Russian), plays, and nine novels in the most prominent émigré journals in Berlin and Paris under the pseudonym "Sirin." During the two years he spent in Paris before his emigration to America he wrote his first novel in English. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight marked the beginning of his career as an American writer, a career which extended into his final two decades, in Switzerland. He ultimately achieved an unrivalled level of popularity, controversy, and distinction, with five National Book Award-nominated novels and story collections; multiple translations and studies of Russian literature in English; and translations of all of his Russian novels into English, as well as two of his most important English works:Lolita, and his memoir, Speak, Memory into Russian for Sirin fans. All the while, he advanced the study of lepidoptera at Harvard, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and at Cornell, where he taught literature for nearly a decade.

Contact: Sarah Funke