Cara Ober layers drawing, painting, and printmaking into mixed media works that reinterpret sentimental imagery. Working in series, Ober combines culturally mediated imagery from children's schoolbooks, home décor, historical texts, and greeting cards to explore notions of authenticity, appropriation, personal identity, and vocabulary.
Ober's narrative works utilize specific phrases and fonts to suggest multiple voices, perspectives, and time periods. Rather than illustrating the text, the images create discord, layering metaphorical and nonsensical outcomes over personal notation. These works reveal the inadequacy of words in expressing the complexity of experience, and exploit the multiple meanings within one simple phrase, exposing the gap between meaning and language. Painterly gesture alternately reveals and conceals Ober's imagery, uniting disparate elements into a palimpsest where memory and commentary merge into a visual diary.
Ober is commercially represented by Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC and Randall Scott Projects in Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in numerous international art fairs in the past few years including Scope, Miami, Aqua, Miami, and Scope, NY.
Cara was awarded a Best of Baltimore MVP Award from Baltimore Magazine in 2009. She is a 2006 MD Individual Artist Grant recipient for painting and took second prize in the 2007 Bethesda Painting Awards. She received a Warhol Grant for Emerging Curators in 2006, and a Best in Show Award at the Torpedo Factory’s Juried painting exhibit in 2006.
Cara Ober earned an MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005 and a BA in fine arts in 1996 from the American University. Cara writes art reviews for The Urbanite Magazine, ARTnews and publishes her own award-winning local art blog, BmoreArt.
To see a mini artist documentary on Cara Ober, click here.
Ober's narrative works utilize specific phrases and fonts to suggest multiple voices, perspectives, and time periods. Rather than illustrating the text, the images create discord, layering metaphorical and nonsensical outcomes over personal notation. These works reveal the inadequacy of words in expressing the complexity of experience, and exploit the multiple meanings within one simple phrase, exposing the gap between meaning and language. Painterly gesture alternately reveals and conceals Ober's imagery, uniting disparate elements into a palimpsest where memory and commentary merge into a visual diary.
Ober is commercially represented by Civilian Art Projects in Washington, DC and Randall Scott Projects in Brooklyn, NY. She has participated in numerous international art fairs in the past few years including Scope, Miami, Aqua, Miami, and Scope, NY.
Cara was awarded a Best of Baltimore MVP Award from Baltimore Magazine in 2009. She is a 2006 MD Individual Artist Grant recipient for painting and took second prize in the 2007 Bethesda Painting Awards. She received a Warhol Grant for Emerging Curators in 2006, and a Best in Show Award at the Torpedo Factory’s Juried painting exhibit in 2006.
Cara Ober earned an MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2005 and a BA in fine arts in 1996 from the American University. Cara writes art reviews for The Urbanite Magazine, ARTnews and publishes her own award-winning local art blog, BmoreArt.
To see a mini artist documentary on Cara Ober, click here.
