Countdown of Biennial Highlights...Zoe Crosher

 

Zoe Crosher, Like Miko Smiling for Christopher Williams, 2008;
From the Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois;
Black and white fiber print, edition 10 +2 AP;
19 3/4 x 23 3/4; Collection of Siri Kaur



Biennial Artist: Zoe Crosher

Using images and ephemera from the archive of mythical figure Michelle duBois, Zoe Crosher explores ongoing themes such as identity, travel, transience, and obsolescence through analog photography and its outmoded states of production, collection, compulsion, and collapse. She has extensively rephotographed, scanned, and reordered duBois’s slippery self–portraits into a recontextualized archive. Michelle duBois, to whom Crosher bears a slight physical resemblance, is one of five aliases kept by an aspiring flight attendant who turned tricks to sustain her travels across the Pacific Rim in the 1970s and 1980s. She took on many different costumed guises and kept fanatical documentation of her many dramatic transformations. Crosher has fixed in on duBois’s transient obsessions, culling from crates, boxes, and photo albums consisting of endless flirtatious smiles, tourist shots, cheesecake mementos, and suggestive poses in every film type and size. Activating the archive by making pictures of these pictures, Crosher’s work finds form in installation techniques as varied as the archive itself. Always suspecting the authenticity of the original, the work ideally thrives in the soft spaces between fantasy and fiction, documentation and theatricality, and individuation and anonymity.