Current Exhibition: Elizabeth Herring / May 8 - June 30, 2026
Elizabeth Herring (b. 1991, Los Angeles) is an artist working in photography, sculpture, and installation living in Ojai, California. Herring's practice is centered around investigating how image production is intertwined with cultural production and vice versa. She works primarily by inspecting history and material, whether the work may manifest as a still-life photo of curious items collected from forgotten dollar store corners. This research has led her to make work about narrative, and the relationship between place and people.
Herring's practice often touches on social networks and community building, sparking her interest in becoming a community organizer and curator. From 2023-2025, Herring co-operated Spore Space, a project space for emerging artists in Ojai. Her motivations for providing a space for emerging artists in Ojai include creating an intergenerational meeting ground for artists in the area during a time of intense residential turnover due to the rise in cost of living for Ventura County.
Herring holds an MFA from The California Institute of the arts, certification from the International Center of Photography, and a BA from NYU Gallatin. Her work has been exhibited at Curveline Space, Los Angeles, The School for Rural Culture and Creativity, Matfield Green, KS, The Basic Premise Ojai, CA, Cashmere Radio, Berlin DE, and Helen's Costume, Portland, OR. Additionally, Herring’s photographs have been published in The Editorial Magazine, Zweikommasieben, Sleek Magazine, Esquire, and Vice.
My art practice is informed by my technical training as a photographer, my theoretical interest in image making, and my explorations in producing three dimensional work. My artwork investigates narrative tropes and their relationship to environment and culture. In 2020 I began a para-fictional exploration of how businesses influence cultural shifts for a project titled Ojai City Gift. There I used my knowledge of local lore and history to build a para-fictional gift store installation that criticized unsustainable tourism through providing a community theater. OCG unpacked how images of a place can manifest as felt impact after being circulated through mass media channels, building new narratives about places of interest.
My work continues to use tourism and settlement as a the lens through which I unpack societal relationships to our environments. For the Micro Gallery I am presenting my ceramic tooth sculptures alongside a selection of my collected photographs. This selection is specifically of amateur tourist photographs found in thrift stores and antique shops. They represent different eras of casual photography, from black and white in the 1960's to color in the 90's, but the subject matter stays the same: people want to memorialize their present, even if the remnants outlast their lifetime.
