Book Ends
For ages, humans have promised (or warned) that books have the power to change us, yet artist Cara Barer sees them — especially reference books like dictionaries, encyclopedias, and atlases, which were once deemed so critical to our understanding of the world — piling up around us in dusty heaps. It was through a chance encounter with a Texas telephone book, an undeniable object of obsolescence that fluttered in the wind like a desperate bird, that Barer became something of a literary taxidermist. In her sculptures, she bends, rends, curls, coils, dyes, and molds the pages of big, beautiful books. Some take on the softly eroding façades of abandoned architecture, their words visible through a pale plaster-like dust; others blossom like coral in vivid tropical hues with languid lines and vanishing tendrils. All of them are then photographed, like subjects of a National Geographic essay, and presented as artifacts from a vanishing world she is compelled to immortalize.
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