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Cara Barer Reviewed in Photograph

1/11/2016

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Picture
Cara Barer’s photographs, on view at Klomphing Gallery through February 27, are so appealing and delicately wrought that any questions they raise, about the fate of books and the ephemerality of the printed word, for example, only percolate gradually to the surface. Barer, a Houston-based sculptor and photographer, searches out abandoned and discarded books and transforms them by curling and crumpling the pages, and occasionally dying or painting their edges. She then photographs the sculptures, which can resemble flowers, butterflies, or mandalas, in the center of a flat black background, so that they appear to have emerged out of the ether.

​The series started a number of years ago when Barer came across a sodden (and now nearly obsolete) Yellow Pages lying in the street, but it feels like a particularly timely subject, given the general unease about the place of literature and publishing in our contemporary, digitized society. A number of other contemporary artists have engaged with this subject as well. In The Weight of Knowledge, 2014, Simon Brown photographed piles of discarded books, lending them a material heft and weight but also a sense of nostalgia. In her Crystalized Books series, Alexis Arnold took old books and magazines and transformed them into geologic sculptures coated in crystals, turning them into artifacts rather than functional objects. What the books have gained in becoming aesthetic objects, they have lost in usefulness.

Similarly, in Barer’s carefully manipulated works, the content on the page may or may not matter. In Paris, 2015, and Iditarod Trail, 2015, for example, she used maps as her material. The tightly curled pages suggest the tubular shapes of old-fashioned, rolled-up maps, but her sculptures also render the maps tantalizingly unreadable. When Siri can alert us to every turn on our route, perhaps maps are going the way of sextants and other archaic navigational tools. The books and maps Barer uses may have outlived their usefulness as vehicles of knowledge, but she has given them a second, possibly more whimsical life.

--Jean Dykstra
The full article is continued on the Photograph website.
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Andrea Schwartz Gallery

545 4th Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 | 415.495.2090 | info@asgallery.com
  • Exhibitions
    • Current
    • Previous
    • By Year >
      • 2023 >
        • Group Show
        • Tom Bolles
      • 2022 >
        • Group Show 2022
        • Deborah Bell & Heather Patterson
        • Suhas Bhujbal
        • Ned Evans & Mitch Jones
        • Barbara Kronlins & John Nelson
        • Patrick Dintino
        • Donald Bradford
        • Wynne Hayakawa
      • 2021 >
        • Group Show 2021
        • Ferdinanda Florence & Gwen Manfrin
        • Heather Patterson
        • Piero Spadaro
        • Cara Barer
        • COLOR
        • Tom Bolles
        • John Belingheri & Albert Dicruttalo
        • Robin Kandel
      • 2020 >
        • Gallery Group Show
        • Ned Evans
        • Suhas Bhujbal
        • Alex Couwenberg & Jeff Metz
        • Stitch Group Show
        • Patrick Dintino
        • Sarah Williams
        • Art Miami 2020
      • 2019 >
        • Gallery Group Show
        • Out of Town Group Show
        • Tom Bolles
        • Piero Spadaro
        • Cara Barer
        • Summer In SOMA
        • Wynne Hayakawa
        • John Belingheri
        • Danae Anderson
      • 2018 >
        • Group Show
        • Ned Evans & Jeff Metz
        • Gwen Manfrin & Tim Yankosky
        • Alex Couwenberg
        • Donald Bradford
        • Barbara Kronlins & Sarah Wililams
        • Patrick Dintino
        • Suhas Bhujbal
        • Seamus Conley & Albert Dicruttalo
      • 2017 >
        • Mitch Jones Julian Voss Andreae Exhibition 2017
        • John Belingheri Exhibition 2017
        • John Bonick - Tracy Krumm Exhibition
        • Chad Hasegawa
        • Cara Barer and Jamie Brunson
        • Gugger Petter
        • Tom Bolles
        • Piero Spadaro
        • Wynne Hayakawa - Ferdinand Florence
      • 2016 >
        • Anderson and Dicruttalo 2016
        • Robin Kandel
        • Patrick Dintino
        • ASG - SFAI MFA Highlights
        • Peter Combe
        • Suhas Bhujbal
        • Palladini and Weinstein
        • Alex Couwenberg
        • Imboden and Lobato
      • 2015 >
        • Barer and Hsu
        • John Belingheri
        • Krumm and Manfrin
        • Surface
        • Tom Bolles
        • Seamus Conley
        • Bell, Corrigan, and Tidwell
        • John Nelson
        • LA | SF
      • 2014 >
        • Suhas Bhujbal
        • Philip Buller
        • Patrick Dintino
        • Florence and Hayakawa
        • Bonick and Yankosky
        • Gugger Petter
        • Brunson and Kronlins
        • Robin Kandel
        • Crowd
  • Artists
    • Search by Name
  • News
  • Gallery
    • Staff
    • Gallery Rental
    • Artist Submissions
  • Contact
  • Bardessono
  • Hotel Yountville