“I keep thinking about the Pacific.” Zoe Crosher’s simple assertion
is a quintessential expression of the repetitive, sustaining quality of
intention that suddenly seeks to bring to the where we live now. The artist
continues: “What does one do when one cannot go farther West? When
one reaches the limits of manifest destiny—where is one supposed
to go after that? The endless promise for once you reach that unreachable
place, and then you have arrived but there is no where to go anymore.
Suddenly stopped by a line, a border—a picturesque and endless border.”
Crosher is an obsessively serial photographer, and her new Trangressions
Series, three of which are exhibited in the Reed and Pomona iterations
of suddenly, continue Crosher’s explorations into the cultural imaginary
as expressed through the medium of photography. In these works, Crosher
explores “real” spaces where “actual” people (Natalie Wood, Dennis Wilson,
and Roger Wade) have vanished forever, swept away into uncertain states
of being at the symbolic edge space of Los Angeles—the Pacific ocean,
and in nearby docks and marinas. In a suddenly panel at Reed College on
October 5, 2008, Canadian poet and suddenly author Lisa Robertson declared
that the symbolic edge space of the city exists as a phenomenon of noise,
an aural boundary contingent on the apprehension of the mobile subject.
Crosher’s interest in the fluid and sublime threshold of the ocean is a poetic
example of Robertson’s thesis. We hear the ocean well before we glimpse it;
and amidst the constant rumble of automobiles and planes that complicate
our ability to discern this most seminal and natural of sounds—sounds of the
womb in which our minds and bodies develop—this symbolic space exists as
a multi-dimensional synaesthetic collage. Crosher is deeply invested in
photography’s ability to move beyond its history as an indexical medium.
In another seminal series entitled LAX, Crosher spent years photographing
planes taking off and landing from Los Angeles’ major airport. But Crosher
photographed each plane through the windows of hotel and motel rooms
surrounding the airport. The series is both a performative poetics, and an act of
witnessing. As a practitioner at the center of current debates on the state of
photography, Crosher has written extensively on her attempts to push
photography beyond technological intention into dream spaces of collective
anxiety and uncertainty that expand our sensory and intellectual experience
of the where we live now.
-Stephanie Snyder, Curator and Director,
Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College |