Carolyn Oberst’s robust body of painting, drawing, and sculpture has interrogated the construction of memory, patterning and nostalgia, themes of self-fashioning, and how codes of behavior are embedded in all forms of visual media. While historically she has used vintage toys as a source of inspiration, in her more recent work she incorporates icons culled from contemporary culture.

In a seventeenth-century Dutch engraving, I find what seems to me an image of Surrealism and its ambiguous liberations. The mythical Pandora stands in front of a Dutch doorway, offering her infamous box (more like a chalice). Out of it come virtues and vices in equal measure, tiny winged creatures that fly up to heaven or spread out to populate the Earth and take dominion everywhere, an eruption of archaic anxieties into the bourgeois Dutch world.