Wanna go to a DC opening tonight?

We're being assured that the artist opening tonight at the Randall Scott Gallery in DC is the real Cara Ober.

"Painting as a mode of thinking" is the way Holland Cotter described the landscapes of Poussin in a recent New York Times review. He likened Poussin's artistic practice to a certain kind of poetry in which "antique references, modern speculation and sensual delirium" check and fuel the import of each component. A viewer might do well to keep this conflicted discursiveness in mind when looking at the paintings of Cara Ober. Her art can look deceptively inviting, almost reassuring in its Hallmark Hall greeting card sort of way, as if the meaning of her jumbled references to old-time dictionary illustrations, sentimental silhouettes, wallpaper patterns and middle class sense and sensibility were simply meant to give us pleasure, the concatenation of images and words an apotheosis of middlebrow taste somewhat like the effusions of Jeff Koons, another notable graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art. But you would be mistaken to think so.

Perhaps like Ober you too are a product of suburban America, perhaps like her you too feel conflicted about the comfortable sources of your pleasures, how often they are rooted in a familiar environment, the taste of chocolate cake, a submissive pet, a doting mother, a non-threatening mate. Perhaps her older work made it easy for you to feel some such generational kinship but the new paintings are darker in color, more subtly threatening in their selection of quotes and definitions, more aggressive in their critique. They will remind you that you are not like Cara Ober.

-- excerpt from "New Paintings and a Wall by Cara Ober" -an essay by Dr. Michael Salcman

The opening is tonight, 7-9PM.