Westside, Los Angeles
Zoe Crosher
Sunlight As Spotlight
Patrick Painter“Ever since the Garden of Allah was torn down and supplanted by a respectable savings and loan institution, the furies and ghosts have made their way across Sunset to the Chateau Marmont. The Garden of Allah was originally the villa of Alla Nazimova, a great silent star, until one night when a fire swept down Laurel Canyon, and she was forced to decide what she wanted to save from her grand house – what, in fact, she wanted at all. And she suddenly knew that the flames would consume all she owned, she would leave for New York at once; there was no point in owning anything in Hollywood, and in this she had a curious premonition or grasp of “place.” It’s a morality tale of the unimportance of material things, though there are those who will say it’s about how awful L.A. is.” – Eve Babitz, Slow Days, Fast Company Zoe Crosher was born in Santa Rosa, California in 1975, and grew up in the Cold War hot spots as the daughter of an airline stewardess and a Diplomat. Her works are in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, to name a few. She has had solo exhibitions from coast to coast, including at the Aspen Museum, and at Dallas Contemporary. She has shown in group exhibitions both domestically and internationally, and has won numerous awards and residencies. Crosher is known as a premier Southern California artist and photographer, representing the beauty and loneliness of lost spaces and ideals. Crosher is enamored by Los Angeles, has an obsession that began during her time receiving her MFA from CalArts. Here, she has reimagined her “Day for Night” photographic works. In “Day for Night”,Crosher uses a photography technique used during the Film Noir days of Hollywood, by shooting images in such a way that they look like they were taken at night. She documents the disappearance of the Los Angeles River, using the sunlight to spotlight the image in frame. For this show, she has taken that process a step further and made light boxes out of the photographs, further emulating the film-like aspect by placing light behind the image, creating, in essence, a single-shot movie. In her more recent works – the Prospecting Palm Fronds series – Crosher takes the discarded fronds found on freeways and streets across Los Angeles, and casts them in bronze using a lost- wax casting process. This results in a gilded look that memorializes an item generally overlooked. In this series, Crosher hopes to call attention to the death of an iconic symbol of L.A.: the palm tree. She discovered that the palms are nearing the end of their life-cycle, and are too expensive for the county to replant and maintain their upkeep. “This work is the next iteration in my conceptually mapping what I call the “imaginary” of Los Angeles – a place that primarily exists in people’s imaginations, inspired from what they see in movies, read in books, hear from other people. It’s the false promise that L.A. is founded on, with the disappearing palm tree front and center of that myth.”