Charlie James Gallery, Dan Graham, and Emma Gray are pleased to present ZOE CROSHER’s For Ur Eyes Only: The Unveiling of Michelle duBois. The show will be housed in Charlie James Gallery in Chinatown, and will be supported by two other events in the neighborhood: an installation of work at Dan Graham at 506 Bernard, and a performance featuring actress Liane Balaban, working from a script by writer/curator Lara Taubman at the Royal Pagoda Motel at 995 Broadway, room #7 from 8:30 to 9:30pm. In this new iteration, comprised of images and ephemera bequeathed to the artist by confidante Michelle duBois, Crosher explores ongoing themes such as identity, travel, transience and obsolescence. She has extensively re-photographed, scanned and re-ordered duBois’ slippery self-portraits into a re-contextualized archive, thriving in the soft spaces between fantasy and fiction, documentation and theatricality, and individuation and anonymity.
Michelle duBois is one of five aliases kept by the 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. Until one day, she didn’t. Which is where Crosher’s project embarks. The Unveiling of Michelle duBois opens with the final published photographs in the archive, to which the artist refers as “the last four days and nights in Tokyo.” The West Coast was Oklahoma-native duBois’ last American port of call before setting off for Asia. So it is perhaps fitting that Chung King Road’s Hollywood-ized take on Chinese culture should be the place to unveil duBois’ Oriental escapism. Crosher has fixed in on duBois’ transient obsessions, making pictures of pictures – of obfuscated faces, of repeated shadows in dark black & white doorways, of arched backs, of backs of backs of photographs and backs of necks, of notes taken and rewritten, scanned and scratched, kept and held and returned – all archives within archives through which we are momentarily granted access into one woman’s fantastical worldview and performed sexuality, framed and reframed by a medium disappearing before our eyes.
Zoe Crosher is an artist living in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited internationally in Vancouver, Rotterdam, Los Angeles and New York City. In addition to her exhibition practice, she has a monograph, Out the Window (LAX), examining space and transience around the Los Angeles airport, and an upcoming monograph on her newest project The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, to be published by Aperture Books. Crosher recently served as visiting faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles and Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA as well as associate editor at the journal Afterall. She presently has projects with LAXART (September 2010 billboard) and the 2010 California Biennial.
CROSHER holds a MFA in Photography & Integrated Media Cal Arts (Valencia, CA). She lives and works Los Angeles. In 2008 her solo exhibition The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle du Bois was shown at the Claremont Museum of Art (CA). She was included in the recent group exhibition Suddenly: Where We Live Now at the Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College (Portland, OR) and the Pomona College Museum of Art, (CA). Her work is included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.