ZOE CROSHER
PERRY RUBENSTEIN GALLERY
Announces
ZOE CROSHER
The DISAPPEARING of Michelle duBois
September 14 – October 27, 2012
OPENING RECEPTION, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 6:00 – 8:00 PM
“This, in the end, is the artist’s fantasy: that over-exposing, fading, blurring or breaking up an image can be a liberated and liberating act. In Crosher’s presentation, it’s as if duBois’ image has consumed itself and left her, not captive to what the world projects on her or to a fixed self she must uphold, but freely undefined. –Catherine Wagley
Los Angeles, August 20, 2012 — Perry Rubenstein Gallery announces Zoe Crosher: The Disappearing of Michelle duBois, the inaugural fall exhibition in our new Los Angeles gallery. For her first solo exhibition with the gallery, Crosher will present final works from the Michelle duBois project, aseries of photographic investigations that reimagines and intervenesin the extensive amateur archiveof relentless traveler andself-documentarian, Michelle duBois. Through this multi-year project, Crosher calls into question our sense of photographic narrative at the end of the analog. By re-photographing, scanning and re-ordering duBois’ “autoportraits” into a careful amalgam of documentary and the imagined, Crosher blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
Since acquiring the archive of Michelle duBois, Crosher has moved through evolving iterations of exploration, highlighting the strategies and structures of fantasy as much as they expose anything concrete about Ms. duBois herself. Crosher has created new works that emphasize the impossibility of knowing oneself, even after an endless accumulation of images. Early approaches often involved the simple act of selecting and grouping images to focus attention on recurring patterns and references. Later works expansively highlight the archive’s physicality as a relic from the pre-digital era by incorporating images of handwritten notes, photo paper boxes, and film. The most recent works have featured highly manipulated versions of the original imagery through re-photography and reassembly. As Crosher has moved through the duBois project, her investigations have resulted in increasingly pronounced interventions leading to the near-disappearance or even total obfuscation of the original source material. The result is a body of work aiming for complete liberation — from photographic, literary, identity and historic constraint.
Zoe Crosher: The Disappearing of Michelle duBois represents the culmination of the Michelle duBois project and effective dissolution of the archive. In theAdditive Dust series, the artist has reversed a typical “cleaning up” of photographs by instead accumulating dust from one photograph to the next in 46 steps, completely disappearing the final image. In the Last Four Days and Nights in Tokyo, prints made from badly damaged negatives depicting duBois posing in an anonymous Japanese love hotel room draw the viewer unusually close before revealing their subject matter. duBois’ Triple Vision Fantasy Landscapes (Sunset) is evidence of how she merged fantasy and reality during her many travels throughout exotic locales such as Guam. And, in keeping with Crosher’s interest in creating multiple iterations of the same subject, a new series of crumpled, disappearing nurses perfectly marries two important styles of intervention that have become iconic of the duBois project.
Crosher’s work is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California through October 14, 2012. She was recently awarded a solo exhibition at the Dallas Contemporary, Texas, and appeared in the 2010 California Biennial presented at the Orange County Museum of Art, California. Crosher has been selected to participate in the prestigious Museum of Modern Art’s, New York, New Photography 2012 exhibition on view October 3, 2012 through February 4, 2013, and is represented in major private and public collections.
Zoe Crosher, Mae Wested no.6 (Crumpled ) from the series 21 Ways to Mae Wested, 2012. Digital C-Print, 36 x 36 inches
© Zoe Crosher
Click here to see more of Zoe Crosher's works.
