Zoe Crosher

Zoe Crosher, TheGood & The Glamorous, Research Image 4, 2017

Zoe Crosher is an artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. She is primarily interested in the gaps between expectation and misremembering, perfectly suited to the historical conditions of photography, the documentary impulse and re-imagined narrative. Throughout her work she questions the notion of a singular history and single image of this imaginary, as well as the efficacy and problems of the archive, totality, and “truth”. Playing with misinformation and mis-captioning, confusing and collapsing the real and the fake over and through time, she iteratively blurs reality, image, material and disappearance, often in relation to forgotten (mainly female) figures. The resulting ‘Imagiatic’ is an idea she coined to describe recent work that it is related to image, imaginary, imagene, etc. but is not bound to the photographic. Realized primarily as various types of images and bronzed sculptures, as well as ‘stand-in collaborations’ with other artists and curators, she has most recently been conceptually mapping Los Angeles and the troubled notion of the “West”. She is currently working on a forthcoming book, The Good & The Glamorous: a Memoir of Misremembering, and preparing for a solo exhibition at The Aspen Museum for Winter 2017. It is this project I will be spending my time on while at the Marble House residency. Inspired by the writings, and especially the image-as-related-to-writing, of W.G. Sebald, I plan to take this approach and apply it to my personal recollections and (mis)rememberings growing up the daughter of a diplomat during the height of the cold-war in Frankfurt, Germany (the late 1970s) and Moscow in the early 80s.

Sebald’s written works are “notable for their curious and wide-ranging mixture of fact (or apparent fact), recollection and fiction, often punctuated by indistinct black-and-white photographs set in evocative counterpoint to the narrative rather than illustrating it directly.” Using photographs I am shooting of my parent’s cold-war archive, creating a visual archive of their version of the cold war, and combining it with texts of my memories, I will be working on this memoir of misremembering, a project that seems timely with our current political relationship to Moscow. Named a “prominent Los Angeles artist” by The New York Times, Crosher’s work is included in various international, private and museum collections including The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Palm Springs Museum, and the Pérez Art Museum Miami. In 2012, she took part in MoMA’s New Photography show, and in 2011 she was a recipient of the prestigious “Art Here and Now Award,” awarded by the LACMA. From 2013-2015, Crosher collaborated with the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) on The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, a series she initiated of artist-produced billboards and activations that unfolded all along the Interstate 10 Freeway, for which she received the 2015 Smithsonian Ingenuity of the Year Award. Numerous books have been published on her work, including one released in February 2016 by Hesse Press and a four-volume set by Aperture Ideas in 2011-2012. She is the founder and president of the Los Angeles branch of The Fainting Club and a fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts in London, was Associate/Assistant Editor of the journal Afterall, and has taught at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Crosher received an MFA from California Institute of Arts (CalArts) in 2001.

http://zoecrosher.com

Art Seed at Marble House Project