There’s a great deal of text in Cara Ober’s multimedia drawings, much of it scrawled in that searching, cursive script so familiar to lovelorn diarists. Every piece in the Baltimore artist’s solo show at Flashpoint is fairly dripping with the stuff: snippets of emo-sounding lyrics, half poems, and fey aphorisms. Ober’s also fond of Courier, the “typewriter” typeface—lowercase letters only, of course—that has graced a million twee album covers. The block of free-association serif text (“filled with helpless letters”) that hovers in space in one piece is so saccharine, so conspicuously placed, that there’s no mistaking it for heartfelt expression. In Untitled #5 (the fourth of july), she even includes a typo in one poetic turn of phrase (“water, like light, forms it’s own edge”)—a gentle dig at the self-seriousness of confessional writing. Ober’s definitely being cool but not ironic. The images she paints, prints, and collages onto her canvases—letterbox stamps, illustrated flowers, fleur-de-lis designs, sketched bunnies, sketched hearts, sketched cakes—all draw from the same tween-to-teen iconography. These elements rarely gel in her blocky compositions, which are uniformly characterized by stiff images set adrift against khaki atmospheres. Patches of abstraction don’t give the pieces any motion, either—though Ober does have a way with washes, as evidenced by the Ed Ruscha–esque slice of words in Untitled #1 (priceless). While there’s a degree of arbitrariness to Ober’s execution, the concept itself is sound. She’s not exactly investigating girlhood, womanhood, or the state in between, but rather the artifacts that state inspires—the mark-making itself. Prayers & Joking: New Works by Cara Ober is on view from noon to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and by appointment, to Saturday, Feb. 10, at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW. Free. (202) 315-1310. (Kriston Capps)
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