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View From Within
November 15, 2004
       
Zoe Crosher
Out the Window (LAX)
October 23 – December 4

        Travel is a peculiar state of existence: in it, a traveler becomes a subject 
        of a public kingdom that belongs to no one and everyone at once. To be 
        a traveler in an airport, a train or bus station, or a hotel, is to encounter 
        the comforts of home (e.g. bathroom, water, television, carefully regulated 
        atmosphere, etc.) without any of the comfort of home. This absence of a 
        sense of place is due to the impermanency of transit. In effect, these generic 
        shelters exist purely to satisfy the temporality of perpetual movement from 
        one permanent place to another.  It is particularly revealing then, when the 
        hustle of travel is slowed down to a palpably meticulous pace in Zoe Crosher's 
        photographs taken from the interiors of LAX airport hotel rooms.
        
        Crosher’s series of photographs—all shots of airplanes in flight
        viewed through a hotel window—are framed in manner that flattens the
        3-D space until foreground blends curiously into background. The LAX Adventure
        Hotel conflates the space so effectively that the window loses its literal
        frame (i.e. the windowsill) and blends into the viewer’s referential
        perspective as an independent photograph hung on the wall. The curtain next
        to it reiterates this effect in an askew comparison while the wall air conditioner
        sets the whole scene as vaguely out of focus.
        
        Crosher lucidly combines these visual effects with the starkness of the
        composition, spinning a narrative of the unseen, unnamed traveler. The hotel
        as a resting stop, reused again and again without suffering the marks of
        it occupants, ultimately conjures the familiar feelings of waiting associated 
        with travel: restlessness, anxiety, and urgency. Impressed by the indexical
        qualities of the photograph and the soaring plane suspended in flight, we
        sense the traveler’s presence beyond the visible scene through a moment 
        of revelatory self-recognition.
       
        Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery
        2712 S. La Cienega Blvd