Installation shot from Zoe Crosher’s “LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds” (2015).
Zoe Crosher’s new body of work LA-LIKE: Prospecting Palm Fronds at LAX Art (on view through October 24) offers an uncannily beautiful approach to L.A.-specific detritus with a DuChampian appeal toward the question: What is contemporary art? Here’s the gist: Crosher goes around to various sites in Los Angeles, picking up palm fronds that have fallen to the ground, and then takes them back to her studio, where she casts them in bronze, and titles them based on the cross streets where she originally discovered them.
Somewhere between the idea that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure, and the Duchamp-ian notion that any object placed into an art gallery can be elevated to the status of art, Crosher creates a dialogue about both the art object as commodity fetishism while ultimately playing into the commodity that she has actually created. Oddly enough, these palm fronds also look like objects that one might find at Crate + Barrel or some other store that sells decorative objects, which only furthers the very meta consumer nature of this artwork. These are all relevant critiques of the art market and American consumerism, and they’re also part of an ongoing theme in Crosher’s work about the landscape of Southern California and its purported ‘value,’ both as a land mass and as a place of fantasy and desire as created by Hollywood.
Read more at http://www.craveonline.com/art/914057-zoe-croshers-dead-duchampian-palm-tree-fronds#KyPcaj5CwkrVFU6P.99
