Zoe Crosher
Artist
Collect this beautiful world of inspiration and people that you meet that you really love...because you never know what will happen.
When she was a teenager, Zoe Crosher stumbled upon an idea centering around the illusory nature of reality—how “truth” is a figment of the human imagination, and everything fades; warped by history, the artist’s bias, the curator’s taste, and the viewer’s subconscious. It’s an idea that sparked Zoe’s evolution into the creative polymath she is today. Her art is tied to the pursuit of understanding “truth as mirage”, with research undertaken through photography, sculpture, music, even social networking.
Zoe grew up in Frankfurt, Germany, in the 1970s and Moscow, Russia, in the 1980s. She attended a Montessori school, which she credits with encouraging her free thinking—“it really gives you a structure, but within that structure you can do whatever you want.” When her family left the Eastern Bloc, moving first to the hills of Greece, and then to Washington DC., everything changed overnight. “Language and every possible permutation of the culture, the language, the weather, the food, my understanding of it—turned on its head.”
In 2015, Zoe collaborated with LAND for the Manifest Destiny Billboard Project, creating a series of lush plant life billboards along a Californian desert highway, which led to her winning the Smithsonian Ingenuity of the Year award. That same year, she also bronzed discarded palm fronds all over Los Angeles for Prospecting Palm Fronds, installed a Shangri-La’d wall at the Palm Springs Museum, and collaborated with Lotusland Gardens, creating “LA-LIKE: Escaped Exotics” by casting the reproductive elements of exotic plants.
Prolific and seemingly perpetually inspired, Zoe is still, like the rest of us, just human. She understands creativity’s ebbs and flows are part of the process too, and it’s up to the artist to ride them gracefully. “No matter what, constantly plant seeds or put out feelers in the world, and keep notebooks about the things that inspire you,” she says. “Collect this beautiful world of inspiration and people that you meet that you really love…because you never know what will happen.”
Written by Caroline Ryder Photography by Curtis Buchanan and Megan McIsaac