reviews 
"Cara Ober's nearly square works reverberate with Lo's verticals perfectly. She fills in what is absent in the margins of his and leaves open the nucleic center that compels him. Ober's semiotic scenes are fractured and strewn with inconsistent memorabilia from a variety of disparate cultural periods perhaps beginning with Victoriana and ending maybe the day before yesterday. "Ober has a writer's addiction to words and phrases and appropriates one or two from the dictionary or encyclopedia for each work. They are fulfilled by their definitions, pronunciation, or an illustration. Because one must approach the image somewhere, these phrases might tempt as the starting point for her cryptic pictographic narrative. On the one hand, the net result of her work seems random and jumbled--this and that, here and there like a junk-mail envelope near the phone. But arrangement is really her genius, and use or nonuse of space a discriminating and carefully managed concern. Each composition is suspended in a perfect balance through some visual or psychological mechanism or other, whether it be violence and sweetness, geometry and botany, negative/silhouetted form with line drawing, or the factual rivaling impulse or obsession." -- Deboroh McLeod. "Dream Catchers: Cara Ober and Tung Lo at Gallery Imperato." Baltimore Citypaper. September 5, 2007. "As determined by jurors Brandon Fortune, associate curator of painting and drawing at the National Portrait Gallery, and artists W.C. Richardson and Tanja Softic, the top honor went to Matthew Klos, a not widely known representational painter who took home the $10,000 best-in-show award. The $2,000 second prize went to Cara Ober, with Maggie Michael, a "hot" (i.e., avidly collected) abstractionist with work already in the collections of the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, coming in a somewhat startling third ($1,000). "Ober and Michael are, in a way, kindred spirits, each using a hodgepodge of mark-making to evoke worlds. The more purely expressionistic of the two, Michael evokes a pretty solid physical universe, if only one made of paint, while Ober's fragmentary collages of random thoughts -- the phrase "maybe you need your pain to accomplish what you do" floats by in 'Evangelist' -- suggest states of consciousness more than place." -- Michael O'Sullivan. "In Painting Awards, Unexpected Outcomes." Washington Post "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. "Cara Oberšs paintings are activated by eccentric juxtapositions that lead to quirky, open-ended narratives. Taken together, Oberšs 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, Oberšs paintings ask viewers to make sense of out-of-place scraps of imagery emerging against worn but still richly colored surfaces.˛ "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.˛ "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."
"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. |