Cara Barer Featured by Musee
In a recent online feature, photography website, Musee, explores Cara Barer's intricate art practice involving the sculptural manipulation of books and their resulting photographs.
"Pieces like “Dawn and Dusk” are especially hypnotizing, the outer curls of its pages dyed a bright red while the center of the piece features bright yellow and blue, symbolizing the times of day. The quirks of Barer’s medium are especially noticeable in this piece – while she seemingly intended to dye only the ends of the “Dawn” side red, the insides of “Dusk”’s pages are visible and the original red color of the pages shines through. Because of this, Barer’s creations not only transform books, bringing new life to the old, but also return importance to the forgotten contents of the pages." —Musee, March 2021
ABOUT CARA BARER
In her experimentation with curling irons, clothes pins and water, Barer transforms volumes of irrelevant and outdated information into coiled, crumpled objects of beauty. By photographing each object as the last step in her creative intervention, Barer affords a second life to the cast-off books and paper she re-reinterprets. Fanciful and symbolic, Barer’s photographs allude to the status of the book in the contemporary digital age, while offering an open narrative for each viewer to contemplate through her abstract compositions. In Barer’s latest work, the artist’s own creations – books bound with sheet music, wallpaper, and pictures from her travels – are captured after being transformed into magnificent abstract compositions.