Cara Ober’s Love To Love You From Afar series of mixed media drawings on paper explore the relationships between personal and collective sexual fantasies. On hand-drawn notebook paper, Ober references the schoolgirl crush and the diary, and creates a tableau for confidential revelation integrated with public messages. In each drawing, Ober renders the face of a person she has personally fantasized about, one for each year of her life, and combines it with vernacular language – from pop songs, poems, and Harlequin romance novels.

With humor and poignancy, Ober contrasts the inherent artificiality of the fantasy with the authentic emotional weight it carries. Functioning both as talisman and shameful secret, Ober’s fantasies hold a mirror up to the dual nature of public and private life and expose a blurred boundary between one’s secret longings and mass media imagery. Mixed media includes graphite, colored pencil, ink, and gold leaf on Johannot printmaking paper.

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When they are roused
Try to guard them, poet
However few they are that can be held.
The visions of your eroticism.
Set them, half hidden, in your phrases.
Try to hold them, poet,
when they are roused in your mind
at night, or in the noon glare.

Constantine P. Cavafy (1916)