Cara Barer

I first wrote about Cara a few months back when her work was being shown at the LA Times Book Fair and just tonight I stumbled upon news that her work is currently up at the Tarryn Teresa Gallery in a group show called “Palimpsests” . Honestly there's so many events going on around Los Angeles it can be difficult to keep up !

Here's what the LA Times says about her work :

Houston-based Cara Barer (like the others, in her first substantial appearance in Southern California) enacts gorgeous transformations of her own by soaking a variety of reference books in water, manipulating the pages, then photographing the results. Her color pictures render books as textural landscapes, sculptural abstractions. In most of the images, Barer opens the volumes excessively wide, so their spines make a U-turn and their pages splay in moody bursts of angles and curls or tendrils of elaborate filigree.

“Piece of Cake” shows a thick wedge of a book (seemingly a volume of “Who’s Who”), its contents humbled into rippled and sliced layers. In spite of the destruction and distortion involved in her process — she states that she never harms “important” books — Barer’s work comes across as utterly respectful, a tribute even to the expanded potential of the printed page.

The exhibit is almost over - it ends on October 29th.

Tarryn Teresa Gallery
1820 Industrial St. #. 230
Los Angeles, CA 90021