As I entered Flashpoint, a modest downtown gallery, I sensed I had unwittingly stumbled into someone’s home. At first I assumed it was the warmth of the room, a welcome comfort after braving the January wind. But after pondering a large sepia-toned canvas, I realized the flower at the top left corner bore an uncanny resemblance to the pattern on my mother’s sofa.
“I grew up in a house with a lot of wallpaper,” Baltimore artist Cara Ober recalls of her suburban upbringing. “I like looking at pretty fabric and pretty patterns, and for a while I didn’t think that those things were appropriate for fine art.”
Ober has since abandoned this notion. Her latest exhibit, “Prayers and Joking,” is a narrative series of twenty-one mixed media collages filled with nostalgic imagery, words and playful blotches of paint and ink. Mass-printed images of birds and flowers juxtaposed with scribbled phrases and formal text both obscure and redefine the domestic conventions they evoke. Her works would fit in with the decorative humdrum of Urban Outfitters, were it not for phrases like “our hell is the good life,” and printed words like “tried” and “trifle” that challenge the nature of the household imagery she tears apart and reevaluates.“It’s funny that the things you rebel against find their way into what you’re doing. I had to get to a point where I made peace with where I’m from and who I am,” Ober said.Though her work grapples with modern struggles of identity and conflict in middle-class America, Ober arrives at her universal statements through personal experience. Among her sources of inspiration are children’s dictionaries and stacks of vintage wallpaper, references from her upbringing that she wasn’t always so keen on using.
“I went through a phase where I decided I had to have everything planned out and everything had to be logical and had to make sense, “ Ober explained. “That was sort of part of the interrogation process of grad school … and I found it didn’t work for me. When I finished grad school, I had this epiphany that what I needed to say I could say with birds and flowers and ornamental things that I looked at all the time as a kid.”
The impulsiveness of Ober’s pieces invites a visual quest for meaning that shuns any sort of conventional arrangement. At once charming and ironic, Ober’s layered canvases seem to internally question their own aesthetic nature, a unique quality that warrants a closer look. While not nearly as impenetrable as purely abstract art, her compositions complicate graphic illustrations with hazy, neutral backdrops and layers of ink spills and penciled notes and doodles. Her work is as much about this spontaneous process as it is about the final product.
“I definitely don’t plan everything out…It’s just about putting something down on the canvas and then reacting to that and reacting to that. It has to be a spontaneous thing,” she said.
Contrary to the off-the-cuff nature of her individual pieces, the exhibit is organized in a clean, linear display, a convenient guide as viewers make their way around the perimeter of the room. But logical progression isn’t exactly Ober’s primary concern, “It’s not really a chronological narrative,” Ober said of her collective works. “A word that I like to use is an elliptical narrative. Things circle around and cycle inward and cycle outward.”
Ober’s indirect and often unconscious approach to her work is what makes her art compelling. It speaks of a truth that is not easily defined, one that is in constant flux and inevitably bears reference to a subjective context.
“Prayers and Joking” is currently on display at Flashpoint, 916 G St. through Feb. 10. The gallery is a short walk from the Gallery Place metro stop.
