Wherever you go, there you are
An exhibition curated by Outback Projects at Curve Line Space featuring works by Carson Davis Brown and Elizabeth Herring
Los Angeles, CA – Spring 2025
How do we hold onto a place? How does a place hold onto us?
In Where You Go, There You Are, Elizabeth Herring and Carson Davis Brown collect, document, and archive—drawing circles around the peculiar, holding a mirror up to the banal familiarity. Together, Herring and Brown trace the imprints of nostalgia, history, and subjectivity in spaces both intimate and vast. The result is a meditation on how images and objects create place, how a memory can dissolve and reshape itself, how the past embeds itself into the present.
In Herring’s video, A Scarecrow’s Journey, a road trip unfolds: two scarecrows, Object A and Object B, move through the landscape, recording their observations, reflecting on their existence. The Tallgrass Prairie becomes both backdrop and character, a site of contemplation and disruption. Herring’s two-channel video work oscillates between the poetic and the uncanny, slipping between ecological documentary and absurdist performance. A voiceover soothes, narrates, informs—until it doesn’t. The scarecrows move inelegantly, manipulated by shadowy outlines of green screen suited bodies that serve as their armature. They act as avatars, but also artifacts. Even as they disintegrate, they are preserved. Cement-encased ephemera. Rebar suspensions. Evidence of their past movement. The gallery becomes an exhibit of their journey, an archaeology of displacement. We, the viewers, are caught in the same cycle. We travel. We observe. We try to belong.
Simultaneously, Brown brings us into a basement in the Midwest – a space both archival and subconscious, where personal memory and broader cultural histories are stored and played. The photographs: too staged to be candid, too real to be artificial. The objects: fast-food toys, war trading cards, wood veneer, binder clips—detritus from a childhood in the 1990s, assembled and reassembled, entangled in an archive of a catalog that has been tampered with and manipulated. But archives are never neutral. Brown’s altered objects play with a drive to hold nostalgia close, teasing out its contradictions, and revealing how consumer culture flattens memory into collectible form. His work questions shared memory by cutting away, layering, and repeating wartime adolescent trading cards—using strategies of repetition to frame their propagandic nature. A fighter jet cockpit, suffused in high-altitude skylight, shifts from artifact to abstraction. Fragments scatter, circulate, and take on new forms.
The stage is set for inquiry: wood paneling, beige paint, green carpet, clouds and camo. Each motif echoing outward. These materials hold the weight of time and cultural perception. They repeat. They cycle. The works gesture toward archives that are in flux, that mutate with each new layer of meaning we impose. With each roadtrip we take. With every sojourn back home.
- Outback Projects
