https://www.zoecrosher.com/the-unraveling-of-michelle-dubois

“Accumulation does not equal clarity – but in fact it compromises fiction.” – ZC

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“A multi-year project, Crosher calls into question our sense of photographic narrative at the end of the analog by re-photographing, scanning and re-ordering duBois’ “autoportraits” into a careful amalgam of documentary and the imagined, blurring the line between fantasy and reality.”

1. Related Press
   1. ‘Slouching Towards Los Angeles’ Is an Escape to L.A. During Quarantine (2020) Steffie Nelson talks about her Joan Didion-inspired book of essays, By Linda Immediato. Slouching Towards Los Angeles originated in 2015 as part of an art project curated by the non-profit arts organization LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division) and the artist Zoe Crosher, who is a good friend of mine. Called the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, it involved different visual artists exploring the idea of territorial expansion through billboard interventions across the 10 Freeway. The project was wrapping up in Santa Monica with a series of events, and I thought about Joan Didion’s influence on writers who have felt the westward pull—myself included—and proposed an evening of L.A. writers responding to their favorite Didion works. Laura Hyatt and Shamim Momim of LAND were immediately enthusiastic about the idea, and we started planning from there. I came up with the title in the first conversation I had with them—at a gallery dinner, if I remember correctly—and it stuck.
   2. The Adventurer, Interview with Matt Holzman for Studio360 (2020) Photographer Zoe Crosher grew up around planes and airports --- her mother was a flight attendant, and her father was a diplomat. So it isn't surprising that when Crosher moved to Los Angeles, she gravitated towards the neighborhoods surrounding Los Angeles International Airport. She found what she considered the real spirit of LA in little airport motels with names like The Adventurer. KCRW's Matt Holzman took a tour with the photographer to the sites of her most intriguing images. From January 1, 2005.
   3. Going Beyond the Photo-Archive The Significance of Fantasy and Photo-Reflexivity in Zoe Crosher’s The Michelle duBois Project by Yonit Aronowicz (2019) “Crosher’s handling of the archive is neither documentary nor investigative; she never intended to use the photos to give an accounting of her subject’s life” (Ross, web). Rather, for Crosher, the archive becomes another subversive means to exemplify the very impossibility of making sense of an individual’s identity through an accumulation of self-portraits, that is, according to Crosher, the very fictional aspect of the documentary photography. “Accumulation”, she stresses, “does not equal clarity – but in fact it compromises fiction” (Crosher qtd. in Blalock, “Part 1”). In this respect, one may realize how Crosher’s formulation of duBois’ archive is not only in keeping with the postmodern concepts of the constructed-unstable self, but also with what Marlene Manoff called “the postmodern suspicion of the historical record” (Manoff 14). - Yonit Aronowicz
   4. Wildfires and Dead Palm Trees Haunt the L.A. Dream in Zoe Crosher’s New Show by Michael Slenske for Seen | New York Magazine (2018) "The allure of Los Angeles has long-balanced on the razor’s edge between fantasy and reality, but lately, with the wildfires and the mudslides and the dying off of the city’s trademark palm trees — most of which weren’t native anyway — and, now, even more deadly conflagrations that have turned fall rainy season into fire season, it’s become a bit too real."
   5. Rooms With a View | L.A.Weekly | Steffie Nelson (2018) “Hopefully I’ll never go back to LAX,” says Crosher happily as we head home in the diamond lane. Fleetwood Mac is on the radio, and the San Gabriel mountains rise clearly in the distance. “This day has the same feel as when I first moved to L.A., the same kind of promise,” Crosher enthuses. “Oh, look at that!” She points to the blue sky. “I think my next project’s gonna be helicopters.”
   6. As planes take flight at LAX, two photographers find a darker reality below in 'Grounded' | Review by Christopher Knight for the L.A. Times (2018) Nearly 30 years later, in the early 2000s, Zoe Crosher began to photograph the interiors of motels and hotels along West Century Boulevard, the wide street that leads into LAX. Not abandoned, these are sites of intentionally temporary occupancy.
   7. Zoe Crosher’s Contemporary Explorations Return to Aspen | Interview by Eliza Jordan | Whitewall (2018) "Last year, Zoe Crosher had an eminent presence in Aspen. She attended the Aspen Art Museum (AAM)’s annual benefit, ArtCrush, with a strong photography piece in the auction. We saw her work shining from private collections in the surrounding hills, and she soon after showed an exhibition on the rood at AAM entitled “Prospecting Palm Fronds.”
   8. “Grounded” – Divola, Crosher at ESMoA (2018) The two bodies of work, Divola’s and Crosher’s, while starkly different, do orbit the same sun, which in this instance is the incidental but sociological history and legacy of LAX, and as Colin Westerbeck aptly noted, ESMoA is the perfect venue for this exhibition.
   9. It's Palm Saturday, Aspen Daily News (2017) Palm Fronds, is an investigation of impermanence. We see representations of the last remnants of what will slowly fade with age: the fronds of the palm trees that are nearing the end of their life spans in Los Angeles. Cast in bronze, they are delicate reminders of the gold prospectors sought in California or, taken with a wider vision, what we can mine for in our own environments, be they physical, psychic or otherwise.
   10. Carla Snap review - Virago at Hilde by Jennifer Remenchick (2017) "There is an imbalance present in the meaning of the word virago; a feeling that perhaps, like many women, real and imagined, she too has been unfairly simplified and misunderstood. Virago lends a variety of alternatives to that narrative through exhibiting works that complicate and individualize their subject matter, leaving the archetype right where it should be: unresolved and complex."
   11. ‘Wanderlust’ examines action, exploration outside the studio (2017) “Wanderlust: Actions, Traces, Journeys 1967-2017,” a 50-year survey exhibition that considers the themes of action and exploration outside of the studio and how artists engage this theme in various ways, opens Sept. 7 at both locations of the UB Art Galleries. It will be on view through Dec. 31 and then travel to the Des Moines Art Center, where it will open on Feb. 18.
   12. Artists go large on Los Angeles’s billboards (2017) “It’s a wonderful medium,” says Shamim Momin, the co-founder of Land (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), who co-organised with the artist Zoe Crosher the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project from 2013 to 2015, spanning ten cities along Interstate 10 from Florida to California. “It’s an extraordinary way to have millions of people see a project, even if they are not consciously wanting to see it. It’s an insertion of the visual into everyday experience.”
   13. Zoe Crosher: The New LA-LIKE by Chelsea Withers, The Magazine (2016) “But instead of lurid tabloid photos, Crosher is channeling cool Ed Ruscha. Her photographs catalogue places simply and straightforwardly; you wouldn’t even know what you were looking at if it weren’t for Crosher’s titles, which function like commemorative plaques.” - Chelsea Withers, The Magazine
   14. "Back to nature: How our latest midcentury modern design obsession reflects our age of environmental anxiety" by Kate Losse, Curbed.com (2016) "The connections between the resurgence of plants and our moment of environmental reckoning are palpable enough that they have become a subject for younger artists. Artist Zoe Crosher created a piece for the Los Angeles Nomadic Division in 2015 that depicts, in a series of billboards along the I-10 from Palm Springs to Los Angeles, a profusion of tropical foliage in various stages of health and decay."
   15. “Madames Electrics” at The Pit on Contemporary Art Daily (2016) "Dear Madames, Madames Electrics is a group exhibition and a book that came together through convoluted collusion, a polluted process of one thing leading to another. A show of lamps became a show of figures, and vice versa. Close and farflung friends came together with strangers, old art and new objects, electric and nonelectric, etc. In the end, light was shed on some hands and not others, some rights and some lefts. Something and some things were lost along the way, but what comes together is still something, it’s something else: Madames Electrics."
   16. Madames Electric at The Pit for Carla l.a. | Snap Reviews by Aaron Horst, July 16, 2016 (2016) "The lighting, a low, somewhat suburban glow provided in pieces by Julian Hoeber, Jamie Isenstein, and Interior Theater, adds an incantatory layer to Lutker and Adriana Lara’s Hands Modeling Air series as well as Zoe Crosher’s mid-’90s C-prints, the latter stewing together the hard-to-resist aesthetics of foregrounded color printing and hazily imaged chunks of the body."
   17. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, by Kate Sutton - Bookforum (2016) In Los Angeles, a town of making or breaking it, a third option is just to disappear. The California dream of reinvention is propped up by vanishing acts both real and scripted. A thousand last breaths are drawn every day across Hollywood. Most are staged, which makes it all the more spectacular when a star’s real death follows cinematic convention …
   18. Bay Watch, SF MoMA ArtBash - Artforum, Scene & Herd (2016) The artist crowd—which included Trevor Paglen, Tacita Dean, Barry McGee, Takeshi Murata, Zoe Crosher, and Julie Mehretu—drifted in and out of Tom Marioni’s The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art, which was telling it like it is from the third-floor sculpture terrace.
   19. MOCA Gala Honoring Ed Ruscha Draws Owen Wilson, Elizabeth Olsen, Patricia Arquette, by Marcy Medina - WWD (2016) The nearly 60 artists in the crowd included Ruscha’s close friends Ed Moses and John Baldessari, as well as Catherine Opie, Doug Aitken, Mark Bradford, Frances Stark, Henry Taylor, Rodney McMillian, Alex Israel, Shepard Fairey, Kenny Scharf, Robert Russell, Thomas Houseago, Muna El Fituri, Zoe Crosher and Piero Golia.
   20. My Business Card Says ‘Enthusiast’ - Zocalo Public Square (2016) Zoe Crosher is the co-creator of the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, a series of 100 artist-designed billboards that spanned the United States along Interstate 10. Before joining a Zócalo/Smithsonian “What It Means to Be American” panel discussion about creativity in America—“What Does American Ingenuity Look Like?”—she talked in the green room about the eclectic mediums she works in, D.C. punk rock, and that time Bill Nye flirted with her.
   21. A World-Class Garden on the California Coast, by Christopher Wyrick - DuJour (2016) A new residency program is opening up the garden to great creative minds, and it’s already bearing fruit. The first project will feature Los Angeles artist Zoe Crosher, whose career has brought her exhibitions at MoMA and LACMA. She has selected plants from the grounds to bronze, turning the ephemeral—sometimes even endangered—into something that will endure.
   22. Between Immersion and Interpretation: Charlotte Cotton's "Photography Is Magic" in The Great Leap Sideways (2016) A selective list of those artists who have participated in New Photography exhibitions at the MoMA in the years 2009 to 2015 provides a serviceable, if imperfect illustration of this recent historical conjuncture.
   23. Organizers Pull the Plug on Paris Photo, Rachel Lowry - Time (2016) “I truly loved being on the lot, from the entry/red carpet to the fake Brooklyn stoops to the larger sound stages, baking in the blazing hot sun, surrounded by food trucks, never sure what I was going to find." - Zoe Crosher
   24. Must-see Public Artworks of Summer 2015 on Artspace (2016) There is no better time of year to enjoy public artworks than the summer, and this year's crop of populace-pleasers will surely be one to remember. From Zoe Crosher's Los Angeles billboards to Ragnar Kjartansson's Central Park boat, these thought-provoking works are already popping up around the country.
   25. [Place, by Kristy Mucci - Brutal Magazine (2016)](/files/Brutal Magazine_compressed.pdf) Artist Zoe Crosher's projects are complex and expansive, but their roots run deep. We lover her exploration of the disconnect between what we think is real and what is pure fantasy.
   26. Openness Is the Mother of Invention (2015) Crosher added nuance to the idea by noting that it’s not that there are no hierarchies here—the politics of the art world, for instance, are “very bizarre, and exist in all sorts of irrational ways that all have to do with the market.” It’s that even in hierarchical fields, often there are ways to work around the established order, she said. The project she was recognized for, which commissioned artists to design works for billboards across the country, was sponsored by LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division), an arts nonprofit organization that she describes as a “really radical outlet.”
   27. This Wildly Creative Art Project Transformed an Ugly Interstate into a 2,400-Mile-Long Visual Masterpiece, by Margot Dougherty - Smithsonian Magazine (2015) An artist whose multimedia works often explore the disconnect between fantasy and reality, Crosher imagined punctuating the arid expanse with a succession of billboards showing a lush Shangri-La of greenery “that sort of dies as you approach L.A., this decaying promise.
   28. The 2015 Smithsonian American Ingenuity Award: Zoe Crosher for Visual Arts (2015) "These winners are the foremost experts, innovators, and creators in their respective fields,” said Smithsonian magazine Editor In Chief Michael Caruso. “We look forward to the opportunity to celebrate their accomplishments and be enlightened to the ways in which their discoveries are shaping our future.”
   29. Zoe Crosher: Head Out on the Highway, Forget the Adventure, by Jordan Auckland - Flaunt Magazine (2015) "I'm looking for a way through something, not against something—or perhaps this very approach defines an iconoclast, and I am one even if I don't intend to be?" Artist @zoecrosher, up now on Flaunt.com.
   30. Did You Know LA's Palm Trees Are Dying? This Artist is Bronzing Them - The Huffington Post (2015) Zoe Crosher: It's an amazing crisis that Los Angeles has on its hands--many of the palm trees that dot the landscape and have come to iconically symbolize Southern California are nearing the end of their natural lifespan and are literally dying/disappearing.
   31. The Amazing Self-Repairing Technique - Flaunt Magazine (2015) The most arresting of the images is a series by Zoe Crosher, which, depending on which way you walk around the gallery space, will either reveal or obscure an image of a woman in a hotel room posing for glamour photos in what turns out to be Guam.
   32. A Two-Year, 100-Billboard Celebration of Going West, by Su Wu - New York Times T Magazine (2015) Shamim Momin and Zoe Crosher first conceived of the cross-country billboard project during a period when Crosher commuted through the Mojave, the “anticipatory desert” a physical reminder of the mythos of finally arriving in L.A.
   33. "To Hide To Show" A Group Exhibition that Explores the Nature of Hiding and Revealing: An Interview with the Artists - Autre Magazine (2015) "I already have in mind the things I want to do and make, and I have tasted what is possible when there is real support behind a project. I think expansively, from huge, harrowing archives to cross-country billboard projects."
   34. Can you capture L.A.'s complexity in a photo book? 'Both Sides of Sunset' tries, by Carolina Miranda - Los Angeles Times (2015) This makes "Both Sides" all about the images — which makes it a wonderful book with which to revel in the wild architecture, the burned-out rocker types, the overpowering roadways, the singular street life, the sublime ridiculosity.
   35. Paris Photo L.A. Presented Los Angeles as a Market Player and a Place Where History Is Made - Artsy Editorial (2015) LAM Gallery brought a 2005 series by Zoe Crosher titled “Out the Window (LAX),” in which the versatile artist holed up in different hotel rooms across Los Angeles and photographed various perspectives of the airport.
   36. Sunshine and Noir, by Ed Ruscha - Metropolis Magazine (2015) Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 2015), edited by Jane Brown and Marla Hamburg Kennedy, explores the many contradictions within the City of Angels. In his foreword, renowned artist Ed Ruscha examines how these photographs capture the romance and grit of L.A.
   37. A 2,400-Mile Art Exhibit is About to Hit L.A., by Catherine Wagley - LA Weekly (2015) By March 30, "Manifest Destiny" will reach the California desert, with a series of billboards by Crosher of seductively lush flora and fauna that decays gradually enough that someone in a fast-moving car may just barely notice.
   38. The Los Angeles Nomadic Division Sets Up Camp, by Nicholas Korody - Art + Architecture (2014) The intention is to give a physicalized reminder of this extraordinarily influential (and often times destructive) 19th century belief which unabashedly dictated the expansion west, that still dictates our movement west, and to gently place/implicate/remind the people unknowingly participating in that landscape along the way.
   39. Ideas Series: The Otherside of Closeness (2013) Encouraging us to examine the images more closely, Ishuck’s manipulations raise flickers of doubt about the authenticity of the source images. Is that really the same dad in the later scenes? Are the more formal party images actually staged? A number of artists including Eva Stenram, Zoe Crosher and Walid Raad work with found (or allegedly found) photographs in related ways. A common thread running through their very different projects is an unreliable author/narrator whose interventions may not always be entirely logical…Crosher rephotographs and re-frames the eccentric archive of an individual/persona called Michelle duBois, exploring the construction of feminine identity through photography.
   40. Village Voice (2006) The Village Voice - 11.22.06 Best in Show / In her photographs, Crosher flash-blasts the interiors of hotel rooms around LAX, making garish drapes and generic furnishings as bright as the Los Angeles sky beyond the windows, each of which frames a landing or ascending plane. The compositions include out-of-focus air conditioner grills, water bottles, and takeout cups, their blurriness emphasizing the jet-lagged ennui of the transient.
   41. Studio 360 - Jan 1, 2005 / LAX, Pico Iyer, Sontag (2005) Studio 360 - Jan 1, 05 - LAX, Pico Iyer, Sontag / Kurt Andersen and writer Pico Iyer hear about an airport that hired jugglers and mariachi bands to calm frazzled travelers waiting in line. Artist Zoe Crosher tries to make sense of Los Angeles by taking pictures of LAX from window seats in arriving planes and windows in surrounding motels. And a graphic designer falls in love with arural airport and turns it into his personal studio.Plus,Kurt rememberssocial criticSusan Sontag.