Cara Barer: Camera Work

Cara Barer returns to the Catherine Couturier Gallery with Camera Work, running October 10 through November 28. It's her second solo show at the gallery, and the opening reception is Saturday, October 10, from 5 PM to 7 PM.

Barer's process starts with disused manuals and outdated reference books—things she picks specifically for their obsolete value. She hand-sculpts and dyes them, turning old pages into three-dimensional objects. For a while, she captured those sculptures with a scanner, which flattened them into a single dimension. She kept the sculptures, though, and started looking at them from new angles.

Camera Work is where she trades the scanner for the camera. She shoots in the natural light of her sun-drenched studio and waits each day for the perfect light to hit. The resulting images are vibrant and play on the ephemerality of the physical medium in a digital age. It's a shift in how she sees the work she's been building: moving from the flat, controlled scan to the depth and changing light of a room.

Barer is a Houston artist who's been exhibiting in solo and group shows across the US and Canada since 1994. Her work has appeared in New York Magazine, The Washington Post, Harper's Magazine, The Boston Globe, and The New Yorker, and she's held in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among other collections. Camera Work runs from October 10 to November 28 at the Catherine Couturier Gallery, 2635 Colquitt Street, Houston, TX 77098. Admission is free.