Zoe Crosher

Zoe Crosher is an American artist and enthusiast [http://artforum.com/diary/id=15837] living and working in Los Angeles. She is represented by DCKT Contemporary in New York [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DCKT_Contemporary] .

Biography

Playing with fictional documentary, Los Angeles, the fantasy of expectation and the false promise of travel, an obsession with transience, the identities it provokes, and the reconsidered archive, her work has been shown internationally in Vancouver, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and New York City. She completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in the Photography and Integrated Media Programs in 2001 [http://www.artshound.com/?app=eventDetail&id=11023] . After editing NTNTNT (2004) [http://books.google.com/books?id=p13rAAAACAAJ&dq=Zoe+Crosher&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=2&ct=result] , a collaborative project investigating the short-lived history of net.art, she recently completed work as the U.S. Editorial Assistant for Afterall, A Journal of Art Context & Inquiry and is now working in an advisory capacity for The Fillip Review out of Vancouver, Canada [http://www.fillip.ca/content?c=6] . She is a 2007 recipient of the Materials & Applications residency in Los Angeles, CA. In 2006, she was the recipient of the Penny McCall Foundation Publishing Award (New York, NY) and the Pillowfight Grant (Seattle, WA). [http://www.diverseworks.org/index.php?pgid=3&subid=6&cid=120]

She's listed most recently as visiting faculty at the UCLA Department of Art [http://www.art.ucla.edu/faculty/visiting.html] . The daughter of a diplomat and airline stewardess, she is for the moment settled in Los Angeles [http://www.laweekly.com/columns/a-considerable-town/rooms-with-a-view/7708/] [http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9802E6DE143EF932A15756C0A9609C8B63] .

= Series =

Out The Window (LAX) (2001-05).

As Julian Myers writes, “Crosher’s method works through the difficulty of taking pictures of Los Angeles, and what she understands as its resistance to being pictured." This obsession with capturing the imaginary of LA began with the series "Out The Window (LAX)" (2001-05) [http://www.laweekly.com/columns/a-considerable-town/rooms-with-a-view/7708/] . By photographing planes coming in to land from each of the 30 different motels [http://www.papermag.com/?section=article&parid=1705&page=1] along the forgotten strip of Century Boulevard by LAX, Zoe Crosher captures the dreams deferred and absorbed into the anonymity of these transient spaces. This obsession with capturing the imaginary of LA reflects an interest in the fiction of documentary, the fantasy of expectation, particularly the false promise provoked by travel, and the mapping of transient spaces, specifically in relation to Los Angeles, a place that moves in shifts and perpetual motion, with no real center, no point of concentration [http://www.portlandmercury.com/visualart/zoe_crosher/Content?oid=39499] . This series culminated in a book published by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design in 2006 [http://books.google.com/books?id=1UQGAgAACAAJ&dq=Zoe+Crosher&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result] , with essays by Norman Klein, Pico Iyer, and Julian Meyers. [http://sfai.edu/People/Person.aspx?id=1367&sectionID=2&navID=365]

LA-Like (2004-)

These interests now inform the series "LA-Like" (2004-), a body of work inspired by the sun-drenched noir of Raymond Chandler and the anodyne boosterism of Helen Hunt Jackson and the other early salesmen of the Los Angeles proto-myth. By both blackening the prints and negatives in post-production and other times shooting directly into the sun, Crosher, in LA-Like merges the poetics of burning with the medium itself. Other elements include mapping LA through its pools, tightly cropped close-up images of the sun’s reflection surface of the water, also darkened. Still to be photographed are large-scale close-ups of fools’ gold, night images along the Pacific where figures both historical and literary transgressed that boundary and disappeared into the sea, portraits of extra actresses in their favorite spots in LA, and a CD of cover songs about Los Angeles (LA-Like(Lost), published as an artist multiple by North Drive Press [http://www.northdrivepress.com/] .

One Year Later

In this series Crosher documents changing femininity, from girlhood to womanhood, in a series of photographic portraits that document girls as their leaving high school in their rooms at their parents houses, and then returns one year later to snap them in the same position in their room as before, with all their inevitable transformations. With many of the elements the same, one can easily play the guessing game in the diptychs of what has changed and how. [http://www.artshound.com/?app=eventDetail&id=11023]

The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois

"The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois", clusters of tourist, performative, and posed images of and by duBois, a call girl with a healthy (or unhealthy by some lights) sense of her own mythmaking, shot in post-WWII Pacific Rim cities during the 70s and 80s and reconfigured by Crosher. [http://www.artdaily.org/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=23506&b=exene%20cervenka] This work was shown in a solo exhibtion at the Claremont Museum of Art in 2008, curated by Pilar Tompkins. [http://www.claremontmuseum.org/exhibit2.html]

= Bibliography =

2008
*Grider, Nicholas (ed.), Into the Field: Post-digital Abstraction in ContemporaryPhotography, Los Angeles, CA
* Zoe Crosher:Wright Image Series, Chicago, IL
2007
*LA-Like(Lost) CD – 4 Cover Songs about Los Angeles – North Drive Press
*Out The Window (LAX) spread for Air Magazine, Cologne, Germany
*West, Paige, The Art of Buying Art: An Insider’s Guide to Collecting Contemporary Art,ReganBooks.
2006
*Cumming, Alexander, “In Plane View: Photographer Zoe Crosher Looks Out theWindow”, papermag.com, December 12.
*Baker, R.C., “Best in Show”, The Village Voice, November 29.
*Thiel, Stacia, “An Hour in Chelsea: Three photographers show their stuff within a oneblock radius”, New York, November 20.
*Snyder, Stefanie, “Zoe Crosher at Small A Projects”, Artweek, July/August.
*Motley, John, “Zoe Crosher”, The Portland Mercury, May 25-31.
*Nelson, Steffie, “The Remix: Window Display”, The New York Times Style Magazine,May 21.
*Libby, Brian, “Reflections in plane sight”, The Oregonian, May 19.
*Anna, Cara, “Cheap Rooms, Cheap Thrills”, Associated Press, February.
2005
*Nelson, Steffie, “A Considerable Town: Rooms with a View”, LA Weekly, December 30.
*Gilmore, Jonathan, “Emerging Artists: Zoe Crosher”, " Modern Painters", October,pp. 68-69
*Cotter, Holland, “Art Listings”, New York Times, July 22

=External links=

* [http://zoecrosher.com/ Zoe Crosher's Official Website]
* [http://www.claremontmuseum.org/exhibit2.html Zoe Crosher at the Claremont Museum of Art]
* [http://www.dcktcontemporary.com/exhibition/view/653 Zoe Crosher at DCKT Contemporary]

=References=