Art opening at Patrick Painter Inc. presenting "Sunlight as Spotlight"
a solo exhibition featuring works by Zoe Crosher.
Crosher, 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 lightbehind 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, hearfrom other people. It’s the false promise that L.A. is founded on, with the disappearing palm tree front and center of that myth.”
“Since the California Water Wars, hidden in the sunlight over Los Angeles, there’s been a shootout over this Desert Queen with amnesia. This particular monarch, let’s call her Los Angeles, will never know who she was because she is always destroyed and rebuilt before her truth ever sees the light of day. The crosshairs of cultural obsessions and illusory lies miss each other like bullets in Chinatown, with tragedy singing to us like a bird in Gilda. Even her palm trees, in all her glory, are falling down, frond by frond. It’s a film noir and the synopsis reads like this: Zoe Crosher, an investigator and artist who specializes in lost histories, meets a glitzy city pretending to be anything but a desert. Claiming that people are watching the city disappear their very eyes, she rushes to collect evidence and objects in time to tell us the truth, before yet another version of LA’s history is forgotten.” – Hilde Lynn Helphenstein
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.
If you missed the opening, then I would highly recommend stopping by the gallery and checking out this beautiful work. Exhibition is open until November 24th, 2018.
Address: # B2, 4031, 2525 Michigan Ave, Santa Monica, CA 90404
You can also view work on Patrick Painter website.