OCMA (Orange County Museum of Art)

Daniel Arsham’s solo exhibition Wherever You Go, There You Are—his first major US museum show—explores the artist’s concept of fictional archaeology. Arsham (b. 1980, Cleveland, OH) works across sculpture, architecture, drawing, and photography to investigate ideas of history, symbology, and the material nature of time.

Traditionally, archaeology has been employed as a methodology to sort through and process the past, but Arsham’s multilayered practice asks the question: What if we could dig through the future? Interested in the notion of time travel, the artist creates works that operate as future relics of the present—eroded casts of everyday objects and human figures built from geological materials like sand, pyrite, and volcanic ash. A camera, telephone, and hourglass, all conductors of information, merge with a replica of the 1981 DeLorean built by “Doc” Emmett Brown in the classic 1980s film Back to the Future to operate as remnants of the present seen through the eyes of future researchers. Together, the constellation of works in Wherever You Go, There You Are tells the stories of our time, reminding us of the innate ways we create, craft, and build objects to assert who we are as human beings.