Elijah Ober
Elijah Ober was born in New Hampshire and grew up in Southern Maine. He comes from a family of artists - his dad, Stuart Ober, is a painter, as is his aunt, Wendy Turner. His uncle, Peter Turner, builds fine furniture in South Portland. He studied Art and Anthropology at Bowdoin College, and spent his summers building stone staircases on hiking trails in the White Mountains. Elijah has worked as John Bisbee’s assistant for the past four years, helping him fabricate his artworks and competing against him in countless sporting events. Elijah’s work combines found materials with his own fabrications to create objects with basic functional aspirations and fugitive presence. His work looks for animistic personality in mundane objects, naively pursues craft, and seeks to be a nexus with a rich set of relationships. Elijah has spent the last three months at the Gardenship Residency in Kearny, NJ, located at a postindustrial site undergoing rehabilitation. Elijah has been casting the footprints of the nighttime wanderers of the residency campus, as well as photographing these creatures at night. This work has Elijah thinking about the role of imagination in the process of forming a sense of place.
EDUCATION
2015 BA Bowdoin College
Summer 2016 Haystack Mountain School of Craft
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
February 2019 “Manifold” New System Exhibitions, Portland, ME
PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE
2015 - Present Artist Assistant, John Bisbee
GROUP SHOWS
Fall 2019 The Pocket Gallery, Newark, NJ
April 2019 Open Digital Survey, The Magenta Suite, Exeter, NH
April 2018 Community Survey New Systems Exhibitions, Portland, ME
July 2017 “Midtoast” Elizabeth Moss Gallery, Falmouth, ME
August 2016 “Mill Works” Frontier Cafe Gallery, Brunswick, ME
