1. Installation view, LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, September 2015
  2. Installation view, LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, September 2015
  3. Installation view, LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, September 2015
  4. Installation view, LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, September 2015
  5. Installation view, LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, September 2015
  6. Installation view, LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds, LAXART, Los Angeles, CA, September 2015
Sep 16, 12:41 pm

The lowly palm frond, all dressed up in Zoe Crosher's show at LAXART, by Sharon Mizota for the LA Times

In a modest exhibition at LAXART, Zoe Crosher takes that most ubiquitous and iconic L.A. debris — the palm frond — and turns it into sculpture.

Cast in bronze and propped decorously in arching shapes on the floor, each frond takes on an almost animal character, as if it were about to inch away. As a group, they form an oblique, ambivalent commentary on the landscape of L.A.

In choosing bronze, Crosher evokes a long history of aggrandizing and memorializing statuary. To cast something in bronze is to say, “This is important. It should remain.” To apply that logic to annoying palm fronds asks us to pay attention to something we would otherwise sweep aside.

The fronds, as a form, are oddly hermaphroditic. One end is long and broom-like, while the other, where it split from the tree, is triangle-shaped with a gash up the middle. Perhaps as an art critic, I am too used to seeing sex everywhere, but there it is.

Still, the most brilliant stroke is in the works’ titles. Crosher named each frond after the intersection where it was found, creating a mini-map of L.A., from Atwater Village to Mar Vista. But there’s no local flavor; all the fronds look alike.

Granted, entire swathes of the city are unrepresented, but the exhibition delivers a landscape, which, depending on your point of view, is either reassuringly unified or depressingly homogeneous.

Please see more here

 
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Projects
  • The New LA-LIKE
    1. LA-LIKE: Sunlight As Spotlight
    2. LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds
    3. LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics
    4. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific
    5. LA-LIKE: LA Imaginary As Unlit Lightboxes
    6. LA-LIKE: Fools Gold Dust (Mimic) Paintings
    7. LA-LIKE: Day For Night (or Sunlight As Spotlight)
    8. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, in conjunction with LAND
    9. LA-LIKE: Mirage
    10. Shangri-LA'd & Expanded Shangri-LA'd
    11. LA-LIKE: Composition I-10, Desert Center
    12. The Manifest Destiny Billboard Perfume
    13. LA Disappearing Frond-Like
    14. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, Dessert Concepts & Recipes
    15. For An Evening with Eve Babitz, at the Chateau Marmont
    16. Tear Sheet Posters
    17. LA-LIKE (LOST)
    18. LA-LIKE: LAXART Billboard
    19. The Pools I Shot
    20. LA-LIKE
  • The Michelle duBois Project
    1. The Uniqued Series
    2. The Additive Dust Series
    3. Mae Wested
    4. The Disbanding of Michelle duBois
    5. The Vanishing of Michelle duBois
    6. The Disappearing of Michelle duBois
    7. The Other Disappeared Nurse
    8. Silhouetted
    9. All Her Shadows
    10. Blackened Last Four Days & Nights in Tokyo
    11. Almost the Same
    12. The Unveiling of Michelle duBois
    13. The Unraveling of Michelle duBois
    14. Posed Postcards
    15. Polaroided
    16. The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois
    17. Obfuscated
  • The Santa Cruz Kids
  • Out The Window (LAX)
  • The Fainting Club
    1. The Fainting Club (London)
    2. The Fainting Club (New York)
    3. The Fainting Club (Los Angeles)
    4. The Fainting Club (More Cities)
    5. The Fainting Club (About)
  • –
  • Publications
    1. LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics / The Bronzed Blossoms of Madame, published by X Artists' Books
    2. The Good & The Glamorous, A Memoir of Misremembering & The Cold War
    3. LA-LIKE: Transgressing the Pacific, Published by Hesse Presse, Los Angeles, CA - Spring 2016 (Sold Out)
    4. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles (May 2015) Published by Metropolis Books
    5. Forthcoming: The Re-duBois Book
    6. Returning to Berlin / Publication curated by Kim Schoen - Motto, Berlin (August 2013)
    7. Why Art Photography? by Lucy Soutter (2013) Published by Routelage
    8. Volume 4: The Disappearance of Michelle duBois, aka *Mitchi* (Fall 2012) Published by Aperture Ideas
    9. Volume 3: The Unveiling of Michelle duBois, aka *Cricket* (Spring 2012) Published by Aperture Ideas
    10. Volume 2: The Unraveling of Michelle duBois, aka *Alice Johnson* (Fall 2011) Published by Aperture Ideas
    11. Volume 1: The Reconsidered Archive of Michelle duBois, aka *Kathy* (Spring 2011) Published by Aperture Ideas
    12. Out the Window (LAX) with essays by Norman Klein, Pico Iyer, & Julian Meyers (2007)
    13. NTNTNT (2004)
    14. L.A. Now: Volume One, Published by Art Center College of Design, August 2002