Reivews

“Cara Ober is a magpie of suburban imagery. In her mixed-media paintings and drawings, she teases meandering narratives out of motifs from her upbringing such as wallpaper, textiles, reference books, tattoos, and graffiti, combining abstract and representational forms to explore communication, conflict, gender, and class on a two-dimensional surface.”
- Rebecca Lowery, Curator and Gallery Director at Flashpoint Gallery, 2007. www.flashpointdc.org



“Cara Ober’s paintings are activated by eccentric juxtapositions that lead to quirky, open-ended narratives. Taken together, Ober’s works catalogue a full range of the more humble modes of human inscribing. She references stencils, the patterns of wallpaper and fabrics, tattoos, and illustrations from childhood books. At times, she also allows words to creep into her compositions. Like chipped and fading walls that have begun to reveal overlapping and embedded fragments from years of human efforts at decoration and expression, Ober’s paintings ask viewers to make sense of out-of-place scraps of imagery emerging against worn but still richly colored surfaces.”
- Kristen Hileman, Assistant Curator, Hirshhorn Museum, 2005.



“Ober has taken her craft to the next level. She paints from the heart and the hip, imbuing her works with equal measures of memory and sexual tension. While maintaining her tendency to toss together crayon doodles, wallpaper swatches, elegant gold fleur-de-lis patterns, drawings of birds and flowers, and snatches of text, Ober has given herself free rein to experiment. These newer works, completed over the past year, exhibit a willingness to accept her uncanny ability to make completely disparate elements look somehow interrelated. Facsimiles of dictionary definitions, airplanes, and neon yellow flowers have augmented her calligraphic doodle style, and the pieces have become even more enigmatic and dreamlike.”
- J. Bowers, Baltimore City Paper, March 15, 2006. www.citypaper.com



“Intimate and unsettling are indeed apt descriptions of the two dozen or so feminist-inspired works in this exhibition, which are both intensely personal and, in many cases, quite deliberately provocative. Ober notes that although she was taught in school that the alleged differences between men and women's art are wholly artificial social constructs, she never believed it. Men and women are different, she insists, and it is those differences that are, in large part, what makes the art women create so interesting.”
Glen McNatt, Baltimore Sun, December 9, 2004.

“One doesn’t know the story she is telling, but [know] it has everything to do with a sensibility’s elaboration of its possibilities. Ober holds our attention with a play of imagery that never quite settles into unpredictability.”
- Carter Ratcliff, MAP Critics Picks Essay, 2003. www.mdartplace.org