Zoe Crosher

Mar 28, 02:24 pm

Zoe Crosher, The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project & Expanded Shangri-LA'd - Palm Springs, The Palm Springs Museum at Palm Desert & Desert Center, April 3rd-5th

LAND Presents
Zoe Crosher LA LIKE: Shangri-LA’d
The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project: Chapter 9
April 3-5, 2015

Zoe Crosher’s chapter of The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, entitled LA-LIKE: Shangri-LA’d, was created by staging a lush landscape in the former Communist Chinese Headquarters in Mandarin Plaza in Chinatown in Los Angeles, CA. The entropic installation was documented by Crosher onsite to track the gradually transforming and decaying façade of a landscape. Crosher collaborated with florist Hollyflora to create a wall of flora and fauna that embodied the fantasy of Los Angeles and the promise of the western ideal. As the billboards unfold over space and time traveling west along I-10 in the Palm Springs, CA area, the lush green foliage, symbolic of the promise of abundance/fecundity and in stark contrast to the barren desert landscape, becomes increasingly withered and brown. The falsity of the romanticized notion of Manifest Destiny is manifest in her billboards as the promise of riches slowly degrades and fades away, just as the intangible American Dream slips away from those in its pursuit.

The launch of the billboards is presented in conjunction with Crosher’s installation Expanded LA-LIKE: The Actual Shangri-LA’d Disappearing Wall at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Desert. Various activations and events will take place during the opening weekend celebration, including the unveiling of a version of the flora wall as depicted on Crosher’s billboards made in collaboration with floral artist Briana Burt of Eventscapes along with two performances of Scott Benzel’s Desert Center (Composition I-10, Mvmt IV: Dusk), a sound composition designed to respond to the traffic patterns and harmonics of I-10. More information here

The Manifest Destiny Billboard Project is a series of artist-produced billboards and activations that are unfolding along Interstate 10 Freeway from Florida to California through spring 2015. Using 100 billboards total, 10 artists create “chapter” groupings along I-10, each a unique interpretive link to the exhibition thematic. The billboards move through and punctuate the landscape by tracing territorial expansion from east to west, along one of the country’s busiest freeways, concluding in Los Angeles.

Participating artists include John Baldessari, Sanford Biggers, Matthew Brannon, Zoe Crosher, Eve Fowler, Shana Lutker, Jeremy Shaw, Daniel R. Small, Bobbi Woods, and Mario Ybarra Jr.