Ojai City Gift
Elizabeth Herring
September 18 - December 31, 2020 (Subject to change)
@
the basic premise
918 E Ojai Ave, Ojai CA 93023
The Basic Premise gallery is pleased to present Ojai City Gift, a window installation conceived by the Californian artist Elizabeth Herring.
Ojai City Gift is an installation that turns The Basic Premise gallery into a hypothetical gift store in the Ojai Valley, where Herring currently lives. Having grown up in Ojai, Herring is well-suited to take up the eccentricities of the place and reevaluate their meanings. Similar to other work by Herring, the installation is enigmatically confrontational. Prominently visible from the street on Ojai Avenue, the city's only main boulevard, it holds up a mirror and asks tourists and locals alike to consider the consequences of Ojai's shift from an agricultural economy to a primarily tourism based economy.
The installation features a densely arranged shopfront window of mixed-media works coded with intricate Ojai lore: a scrolling digital sign that displays texts by Jiddu Krishnamurti, an Indian philosopher whose time in Ojai created its image as a regional hub for new age thinking; a painted "carnival cutout" that invites visitors to take a photo of themselves as an influencer meditating in front of the Topa Topa mountains; a rack of postcards made of Herring’s images from other window displays in town; shirts and ephemera from restaurants and stores that have closed; a tapestry depicting a handful of the of the city's schools as "thought forms"; and also present are Herring's "scarecrows"—totems that embody character tropes from her on-going work in world building. Herring’s use of these disparate mediums allows her to explore the discrepancies between the reality of places and the media narratives built around them. In imagining a garish storefront that goes against the current wave of mid-century modern revival and tasteful minimalism, Herring asks her audience to consider the narratives surrounding the tourist economy that has developed in Ojai over the past 10 years. Ojai City Gift examines the roots of taste and cultural history specific to the region. Ojai City Gift is a dynamic installation that will shift and evolve over time. Much like an actual store, new stock will be added as old stock is purchased or becomes irrelevant.
In Ojai, Herring has found a microcosm for the larger themes that are coming to define the new cultural norms. As Covid-19 accelerates the repopulation of exurban small towns across the country, Herring's insights and perspectives push individuals to reevaluate how they relate to their digital and physical realities.
Born in 1991 in Los Angeles, Elizabeth Herring is a graduate student enrolled in the CalArts MFA Photography and Media program. Her work has been shown at the International Center of Photography in New York as well as PLU 41 and Cashmere Radio in Berlin. In 2016, she completed a residency at Berlin's Institut für alles Mögliche. Her work encompasses photography, installation, collage, and sculpture, and often features themes of sexuality, kitsch, fantasy, and social media criticism.
The show is on view 24 hours of the day and does not include entry into the gallery.The carnival cutout is available on weekends only.
Elizabeth Herring currently lives and works in Ojai, California.
