Gold Custody
Barbara Bloom and Ben Lerner

Barbara Bloom and Ben Lerner share a fascination with intricate dramas of framing and reframing: what happens to an image or a phrase when it is re-encountered, recontextualized, recombined — when a particular frame of reference is established or collapses? How is meaning accrued or eroded through repetition, across pages or generations? How are images or sentences enlisted in — or suddenly freed from — the construction of our personal and collective mythologies?

In this collaborative book, bringing together Bloom’s artworks and Lerner’s prose poems, these questions are rendered beautiful as they are sensitively felt, veering between the promises of abstraction — ‘the showroom of grammar, its glitter and ghosts,’ collective nouns, songs without lyrics that everyone can sing — and verbal and visual languages of extreme privacy. Other topics include false fathers, lice, stone fruit, Casper Rappaport, color words, alephs, forever stamps, and Goethe’s corridor.
(source: https://mackbooks.eu/products/gold-custody-br-barbara-bloom-ben-lerner)

About the Artists
Photographer, designer, and installation artist Barbara Bloom (b. 1951) has built her career out of questioning appearances, exploring the desire for possessions, and commenting on the act of collecting.
(source: https://www.icp.org/exhibitions/the-collections-of-barbara-bloom)

Born and raised in Topeka, Kansas, writer and editor Ben Lerner earned a BA in political science and an MFA in creative writing from Brown University. He has served as a Fulbright scholar in Madrid and as a Guggenheim fellow. In 2015 he was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellowship.
(source: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ben-lerner)