Cara Barer | Wandering
Cara Barer | Wandering
February 5 - March 2, 2026
Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin
1384 Dufferin Street, Toronto
Opening reception: Saturday, February 7th from 2 - 4 pm | Artist in Attendance
This February, Bau-Xi Gallery | Dufferin is thrilled to present Wandering, a transformative exhibition by acclaimed photographic artist, Cara Barer. Within her unique and dynamic practice, Barer uses printed materials – such as maps and reference texts – to discuss how the meaning and function of these objects change when placed within an entirely digital framework. The resulting documentation of these ‘sculptures’ are intended to explore notions of impermanence and the erosion of knowledge in our current day and age
Artist Statement:
I work with discarded maps and reference books as both material and metaphor. Once designed to orient or instruct, these maps and books have outlived their practical use, replaced by digital navigation and constantly shifting borders. By soaking, folding, compressing, and re-forming them, I transform flat systems of information into sculptural objects.
I am interested in how knowledge erodes when total dependence is placed in a digital world, and how meaning changes when the original function of a physical map or guidebook is removed.
Photography allows me to fix these temporary forms by preserving a moment of physical tension. My camera becomes a tool of translation, moving the work from object to image. Through this process, my books and maps become meditations on impermanence, how we seek knowledge or obtain information, and the human desire to locate ourselves within an ever-shifting world. – Cara Barer
Co-Director of Bau-Xi Gallery, Kyle Matuzewiski, writes:
Having represented Cara’s work at Bau-Xi for almost 15 years, it is not lost on me how her work has been a harbinger of our increasing dependence on digital means to access information.
By using reference texts, atlases, journals, and so on, Cara creates and weaves a narrative whereby she acknowledges the importance of those texts – from a historical perspective – but negates their relevance via their deconstruction. The sculptural element of the documentation (resulting photograph) could also be a metaphor for how we interpret, internalize and interact with information in a digital world. That information becomes fragmented, summarized, and at times lacks the full weight with which it should carry.
Beyond that, Cara creates truly captivating images, which continue to delight and amaze both viewers and collectors alike. The sheer imagination within her practice is a guiding force that will lead to countless creations.
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Cara Barer is an internationally recognized established American photographer known for her abstract compositions of books and printed material.
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 works allude to the status of the book in the contemporary digital age while offering an open narrative for each viewer to contemplate. In Barer’s latest work, the artist’s creations – books bound with sheet music, wallpaper, and pictures from her travels – are captured after being transformed into magnificent abstract compositions.
Cara Barer has exhibited in solo and group shows throughout the US and Canada since 1994. Her work has been featured extensively in such publications as New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Harper’s Magazine, The Boston Globe and The New Yorker, and can be found in the collections of Bloomingdale’s, Saks, Lehigh University, Nordstrom, United States Embassy, Kyiv, Ukraine, VISA, Wells Fargo Bank and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Barer lives and works in Houston, Texas.