ZOE CROSHER: My name is Zoe Crosher, and you are looking at a wall installation from my ongoing series, the Michelle duBois Project.
EVA RESPINI: duBois is a real person. An amateur photographer, she took thousands of pictures of herself, over time, in different locations, often posing as different characters. duBois, who was friends with Crosher’s aunt, gave Crosher twenty years’ worth of her photos. Since then, Crosher has created multiple series around this archive. The title of this installation is Stares & Silhouettes for MoMA from The Disbanding of Michelle duBois.
ZOE CROSHER: In this particular series I was trying to make it hard to see her. Just physically making it difficult. So it would either be her in shadow or you would see the back of her neck.
EVA RESPINI: The anchors of this display are two large color photographs of duBois posing as the legendary American actress, Mae West.
ZOE CROSHER: Her gaze is the thing that dictated how everything would get installed.
And I wanted to complicate that act of looking at these beautiful pinup shots, and interrupt the looking. So I crumpled them up. And then I hung them and re-photographed them with flash.
I included both the border of the photograph, which is generally something that gets edited out, along with part of the wall, and you have this tension between looking at this seductive image and then going through this act of realization that you’re looking at something. And that's actually extended even more in the smaller studio shots, where I pull out even more, so you see the same series, but you actually see it in the studio context.
So often now, in digital photography, we just erase things as we go, and so all of the things that didn't make the final cut are barely in the process. But with this physical analogue material, there's so much left over that gets forgotten. And so it was about bringing back in, all of these mistakes, exposing the process of the piece, along with the piece itself.
Some people read this endless accumulation of images in a really tragic way. That she’s sort of this obsessive person.
But for duBois it's just this celebration that keeps happening over and over again. And she is totally involved in the process and she gets a cut of what I make. It becomes about different levels of fantasy her fantasy of me, my fantasy of her.
Clearly this obsessive tendency to document oneself carries tremendous significance especially now in this Facebook moment, she’s sort of Facebook before Facebook.