Zoe Crosher
32 Days - The Dis/Reappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson
Out The Window (LAX), reached its completion last fall with a publication and solo shows in Portland and New York. It was a project five years in the making, photographing planes coming in to land from every motel and hotel along the forgotten strip of Century Boulevard by LAX. Thirty-one photographs in all and large scale (27"x27", mounted on aluminum), each image was taken from inside the hotel room through the window with only the plane in focus. Published by LA Forum and including texts by Pico Iyer, Norman Klein & Julian Myers, the project concentrates on what Myers describes as "Crosher"s method of working through the difficulty of taking pictures of Los Angeles, and what she understands as its resistance to being pictured." This obsession with capturing the imaginary of LA reflects my interest in the fiction of documentary, the fantasy of expectation, particularly the false promise provoked by travel, and the mapping of transient spaces, specifically in relation to Los Angeles, a place that moves in shifts and perpetual motion, with no real center, no point of concentration.
These interests now inform the series LA-Like, work inspired by the sun-drenched noir of Raymond Chandler and boosterism of Helen Hunt Jackson and the other early salesmen of the Los Angeles proto-myth. By both blackening the prints and negatives in post-production and other times shooting directly into the sun, I am interested in merging the poetics of burning with the medium itself. Other elements include mapping LA through its pools, tightly cropped close-up images of the sun"s reflection surface of the water, also darkened. Still to be photographed are large-scale close-ups of fool's gold, night images along the Pacific where figures both historical and literary transgressed that boundary and disappeared into the sea, portraits of extra actresses in their favorite spots in LA, and a CD of cover songs about Los Angeles. All these elements will come together in a book & a show form.
Also in process is the transformative series 1 Yr Later, diptychs of girls from all over the US photographed in identical scenarios in their last year of high school and again exactly a year later.
Playing with fictional documentary, the fantasy of expectation and the false promise of travel, an obsession with transience, the identities it provokes, and the reconsidered archive, her work has been shown internationally in Vancouver, Rotterdam, Los Angeles, and New York City. She completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in the Photography and Integrated Media Programs in 2001. After editing NTNTNT (2004), a collaborative project investigating the short-lived history of net.art, she has recently completed work as the U.S. Editorial Assistant for Afterall, A Journal of Art Context & Inquiry and in an advisory capacity for The Fillip Review out of Vancouver, Canada. The daughter of a diplomat and airline stewardess, she is for the moment settled in Los Angeles. www.zoecrosher.com
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Staatsorgaan voor Toekomst Organisatie en Planning S.T.O.P.
Possibilities in interfering with group-dynamics
S.T.O.P. is the Dutch Governmental agency of Future, Organisation and Planning and has been initiated by the Parliament in 2003. The Dutch parliament was concerned about the future of the national state as it is presently conceived, as the contemporary developments show a decline in the power of the traditional state. S.T.O.P supports the Dutch government with the means of empirical research concerning social cohabitation. The government has created zones that are excluded from Dutch Constitution to provide the opportunity to do research without restrictions. In the seventieth century Thomas Hobbes who was tired of the brute English civil war wrote Leviathan. Hobbes wanted to find a theory of governance with credentials as unimpeachable as those of Euclid’s geometry. Despite all scientific developments and political as well we still face the consequences of social instability like war, frictions and inequality these days.
However, people are hard to predict in their decision making process and therefore their eventual behavior. In recent researches S.T.O.P. found the huge impact of group dynamics on individual behavior and consequently decided to launch a research on this specific subject. In society there will hardly be the chance to find a situation in which a group is totally isolated. Therefore a research zone has been installed without clearly marked borders or defined test subjects, witch means that we do research on all places where test subjects come together like chat rooms, classrooms, public transport and markets etc. jet.hetwinterkoninkje.nl