Michelle duBois as "...Facebook before Facebook"
The following is an excerpt from an interview between Interview Magazine and Zoe Crosher from 2012. The artist discusses "The DISAPPEARING of Michelle duBois," her first solo exhibition at Perry Rubenstein gallery.
"I talk about Michelle duBois as a kind of Facebook before Facebook," Crosher told Interview via phone, a week before the opening. She refers to the fact that duBois, a call girl/flight attendant who worked in the Pacific Rim in the '70s and '80s ("She is a real person," says Crosher. "Michelle duBois is one of the five aliases she used"), documented herself with an intensity more suited to a Me Generation exhibitionist. Crosher calls duBois's practice "the Kodak amateur fantasy," explaining the posed beauty shots duBois took of herself, the glamorous liberated figure she seemed to want to bequeath to the world, with Crosher as the conduit—the social media platform, if you will.
Much of Crosher's work involves digging through, enlarging, and altering the extensive photographic archives of duBois, coaxing the viewer to try to draw conclusions upon the work. A tenet of Crosher's work is the exposing of the failures in trying to do so; the fallacy of piecing information together from sets of photographs is like patching together someone's life via their social media timeline.
Interview Magazine, September 2012
About the Artist Zoe Crosher was born in 1975 and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, and in addition to her photography, the artist creates books centered on her practice: Out the Window (LAX), examines space and transience around the Los Angeles airport, and a recently published four-volume book series created with Aperture Ideas examines her most recent work, The Michelle duBois Project. Crosher has served as a visiting professor at UCLA and Art Center College of Design, and was associate editor of the journal Afterallafter receiving her MFA from CalArts. The artist was also awarded the prestigious Art Here and Now Award by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and won the Rauschenberg Award in collaboration with The Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) in 2011. One year later, Crosher was featured in MoMA's 2012 New Photography exhibition. The artist is represented by Perry Rubenstein Gallery.