CRITIC’S PICK, NEW YORK TIMES, JULY 4, 2024 BY WALKER MIMMS
A Masterpiece of Fiction Inspires the Urge to Submerge in a Gallery Crawl In New York’s art show of the summer, paint and prose meet in “The Swimmer,” a psychoanalysis of John Cheever’s suburban nightmare of 1964.
…“In the final line, our hero reaches home and a terrible twist. There is something doomed in poor Neddy — whether it is the American spirit, you decide — and the show’s most disquieting depth comes in a deceptive set of large-scale square photographs by Zoe Crosher. Forensic in feel, they depict the sites of waterfront disappearances, both fictional and real.
In one photograph from 2008, what appears to be a random nighttime infrastructure, flash-burned and dark, turns out to be the pier where Dennis Wilson, the Beach Boy, was last seen, in 1983, before diving drunk into the Pacific to retrieve belongings he had thrown in years earlier. Wilson was the only member of the band who actually surfed, and was also the musician behind a concept album about that ocean. The tragic Wilson — fired from the Beach Boys — is the antithesis of Thek’s diver of infinite possibility.
In an exhibition of varied, heartful and brilliant blues, the water in this photo is black, and it drags us into the final, brutalizing word of Cheever’s parable: empty.”
- Walker Mimms
*Installation view of The Swimmer at The FLAG Art Foundation, 2024. Photography by Steven Probert.
ALL IMAGES COPYRIGHT ZOE CROSHER 2025
CONTACT: Z@ZOECROSHER.COM
Site by The Future.