Cara Barer's Book Sculptures

Cara Barer is an American artist that produces peculiar book sculptures that she then perfectly photographs.

Sometimes her main art tool might be yellow pages, or telephone books, or old atlases, that she dampens to give them extravagant shapes, sometimes with colors and sometimes in black and white.

Barer's work presents delicate romantic visions with book butterflies or kaleidoscopic visions with explosions of colors. "I arrive at some of my images by chance and others through experimentation. Without these two elements, my work would not flow easily from one idea to the next," Barer explains of her work. "A random encounter on Drew Street with a Houston Yellow Pages was the primary inspiration for me. After that chance meeting, I began to search for more books, and more ways to recreate them. I realized I owned many books that were no longer of use to me, or for that matter, anyone else.

Would I ever need a "Windows 95 Manual"? After soaking it in the bathtub for a few hours, it had a new shape and purpose. Half-Price Books became a regular haunt, and an abandoned house yielded a set of outdated reference books, complete with mold and neglect. Each book tells me how to begin according to its size, type of paper and sometimes contents.

As I begin the process, I first consider the contents of each volume.

I only spent a few seconds on the "Windows 95 Manual". The transformation and photographic documentation led to thoughts on obsolescence and the relevance of libraries in this century."