Cara Barer: Obsolescence

Houston based artist, Cara Barer blurs the line between object, sculpture, and photography. She salvages discarded or obsolete books and transforms the books into sculpture by using water, clamps, string, staples, and glue. She then photographs the sculpted books, capturing the extraordinary grace and beauty of their altered forms. Barer’s sculptures and their accompanying photographs are a lament for eras past when books were considered valuable as a path to knowledge. As books are becoming increasingly disposable, replaced by the internet as the primary source of information, Barer hopes to raise questions about the transient, exploitive, and fragile nature in which we now choose to gain knowledge and about the future of books in our current culture.

“I transform books into art by sculpting them, dyeing them and then through the medium of photography presenting them anew as objects of beauty. I create a record of that book and its half-life. Books, physical object and repositories of information are being displaced by zeros and ones in a digital universe with no physicality. Through my art, I document this and raise questions about the fragile and ephemeral nature of books and their future.”  Cara Barer

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