“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.” – The Village Voice
“Often, documentary photography looks at something from the outside, with a kind of fictional neutrality. But in reality, documentary photography is very much about the position of person photographing it and not any sort of ultimate “truth.” My intention is to conceptually map 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. By photographing and documenting these arrivals from the inside looking out, from within these transient and intimate spaces from each and every hotel along Century Blvd (at that time, some have already disappeared since I shot this project), I hope to activate the narrative both within the rooms and the larger narrative outside of the fantasy of Los Angeles.” – Zoe Crosher
Out The Window (LAX) is a project examining space and transience around the Los Angeles International airport. This project investigates LAX and its surrounding infrastructure as a point of non-center, a metaphor for Los Angeles, captured from surrounding satellite positions. For it, I mapped and photographed planes coming into land, through windows from inside the thirty-one airports running along Century Boulevard. Images are large C-prints and window-sized, 27 × 27”, mounted and laminated.
“Contemporary artist Zoe Crosher takes the viewer on an exploratory journey inside the impersonal and transient travel world surrounding the mega international airport, LAX. She finds a landscape packed with identical hotel chains pushed up against giant billboards, where the words hotel and taxi are understood by nearly everyone. Crosher methodically settled into a different hotel room each day and photographed out the window. The only requirement was that the view from each room must duplicate the one she inhabited before. The pattern of the drapes change, the color of the stucco exterior changes and the airplanes caught in mid flight move through the atmosphere, but the basic view stays the same. There is a haunting familiarity that one has never really left the first room, a feeling of complete déjà-vu. Time and identity almost cease to exist. For Crosher, her very quiet, minimal images create huge questions about place, identity, the homogenization of global cultures.” – Pico Iyer
“Zoe Crosher’s series of LAX prints have a vintage ambiance to them, though they were made between 2001 and 2005. They depict slightly gaudy hotel rooms near the airport, which means seas of cars and the occasional ascending plane can be seen from the windows. The camera always looks out—out the window, or out the sliding door—and the result is a vague feeling of yearning, but since there is no specified subject to attribute the feeling to, it just floats languidly on the image’s surface”
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2024
CONTACT: Z@ZOECROSHER.COM
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