Cara Barer | Opening Reception and Book Launch
Cara Barer | Opening Reception and Book Launch
November 10-24, 2018
350 Dundas St West, Toronto
Opening Reception and Book Launch: Saturday, November 10, 2-4 pm. Artist in Attendance.
Join us on Saturday, November 10 from 2-4pm for the opening of Cara Barer's latest exhibition, Scrapbooks, and to celebrate the launch of Transformations, the first-ever monograph of her work. The artist will be in attendance to discuss her work, and sign copies of her book.
About the exhibition: In Scrapbooks, Barer draws on her personal archive as source material, filled with memory. Barer gathers travel photographs, scraps of paper, guestbooks and maps, binds them into book form, and sculpts them into abstraction. Her final photographs speculate about how we might carry on when that archive is gone. After the Flood is a provocative example that refers to more than the post-hurricane Houston from which it comes. Ambiguously optimistic in its references to disaster, renewal and rebirth, it reiterates Barer’s thesis: that a book is never broken, and memory never lost, only made anew with time and care. Indeed, it is not loss, but accumulation and excess that continues to describe Barer’s future projects, as she remains committed to her practice as a special kind of record keeping. For as long as the book sculpture can take new shape, evolving into more free-form and abstract compositions, so will Barer meticulously sculpt and document. Of the new, hand-bound books waiting to be photographed, Barer aspires to fit in more information than ever before: “I want them to be denser.” From Transformations, 2018.
The viewer can detect the different ephemera, but the images began with my “scrapbooked” thoughts, dreams, visions, and hope.