Zoe Crosher - Out the Window [LAX] (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design)

Contemporary artist Zoe Crosher takes the viewer on an exploratory journey inside the impersonal and transient travel world surrounding the mega international airport, LAX. She finds a landscape packed with identical hotel chains pushed up against giant billboards, where the words hotel and taxi are understood by nearly everyone. Crosher methodically settled into a different hotel room each day and photographed out the window. The only requirement was that the view from each room must duplicate the one she inhabited before. The pattern of the drapes change, the color of the stucco exterior changes and the airplanes caught in mid flight move through the atmosphere, but the basic view stays the same. There is a haunting familiarity that one has never really left the first room, a feeling of complete déjà-vu. Time and identity almost cease to exist. For Crosher, her very quiet, minimal images create huge questions about place, identity, the homogenization of global cultures.