Mosaics, memories and merchandise: with diminutive collages and grand public projects, Alexis Smith weighs in on the humanity—and the humor—of an image-obsessed society - Critical Essay

Art in America, Nov, 2001 by Michael Duncan

Alexis Smith's knockout installation at SITE Santa Fe, Red Carpet--a large-scale carpeted space that suggests nothing so much as an anteroom to the paradisaical hell of the American West--brings back to art-world prominence an artist seemingly missing in action since her 1992 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. This reemergence is also marked by recent gallery shows on both coasts of the small-scale collage work for which Smith is best known. Furthermore, a gallery installation commissioned last year by the Miami Art Museum opened on Oct. 13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego.

Since the early 1970s, Smith has mined prevailing ideas about gender, sexuality, nationalism and morality, making art out of the paradoxes of everyday life. The elements in her collages are chosen and combined to reflect the quirks of the contemporary psyche. Smith seems fully aware that the mostly worthless thrift-shop goodies she pillages for her pieces exist at the intersection of commerce and culture. Sampling product names, slang, adages, fashion, children's stories, novels, movie dialogue, ad copy and pop lyrics, she has amassed a loose kind of worldview--one that is jaundiced but stops shy of cynicism. Like Ed Ruscha and Raymond Pettibon, she has bent pop rhetoric to her own purposes, twisting cliches into conundrums, transmuting pabulum into profundities.

Although not often heard from in the last decade, Smith has been far from idle, occupying herself with superscale public-art projects, notably Snake Path (1992) for the Stuart Collection of site-specific sculpture at the University of California at San Diego [see A.i.A., July '97] and two sprawling terrazzo floorscapes, one at the Los Angeles Convention Center (1993), the other at Ohio State University's Schottenstein Arena (1999). Designed for public areas with extremely heavy pedestrian traffic, the terrazzo pieces immerse visitors in macrocosmic images that can be fully grasped only from staircases and mezzanines.

The 55,000-square-foot south lobby at the L.A. Convention Center features a terrazzo map of the entire Pacific Rim, ornamented with 5-foot-diameter medallions that symbolize individual cultures of the region. Roughly fan-shaped, the widest part of the lobby floor features the Pacific framed by the Americas and Asia. Unaccustomed to this oceanic perspective, even the most savvy visitors require considerable time to orient themselves to what seems to be irregularly scattered ornamentation. Smith's project transposes the usual handheld scale of a map into an architectural space where vast distances can be bodily experienced. The relative size of, say, Australia is "felt" by walking across it. The floor, too, subverts our usual sense of command over a map. A kind of Alice in Wonderland shrinking effect has put us in the midst of a map's now-vast realm.

Conveying a broader and more uncertain sense of place, the 30,000-square-foot upper floor of the convention center's west lobby portrays a night sky with constellations and the Milky Way. Reversing up and down, Smith depicts the sky under one's feet. Stairs lead to a lower level, where another terrazzo project portrays the moon and a slice of the California coastline. With radical changes in scale and orientation, the three floors function like a zoom lens, shifting visitors' perceptions between the regional and the continental, the global and the cosmic.

The 71,000-square-foot floor at Ohio State's arena plays further wry tricks with scale, dwarfing fans with leviathan effigies of former university sports celebrities. The historical awareness that sports thrive on--the heritage of a team's past glories--is ingrained in these vastly larger-than-life forms, which are based on archival photographs and executed in the school colors of red, white and gray. Source images for the floor were broken down into a staggering number of zinc-lined sections--some just a half inch across--into which colored concrete was poured. A technical tour de force, the project was recently declared the "Terrazzo Job of the Century" by the National Terrazzo & Mosaic Association.

Smith provided her Buckeye patrons with representations guaranteed to please while giving a surreal spin to our culture's exaggerated adulation of sports stars. She seems to relish the off-kilter comedy involved in placing superhuman figures underfoot, susceptible to scuff marks and Diet Coke spills. The floor's gigantic scale perversely denies fans the satisfaction of fully perceiving their heroes. As Smith stated in a 1998 interview with the Los Angeles Times, "You'll be able to stand on a balcony and see [John] Havlicek's face. On the floor, like a Lilliputian standing on Gulliver, you'll know what you are standing in but you won't be able to stand back and savor it, so there will be an edge of frustration."

With its far more abbreviated area, Smith's Red Carpet in Santa Fe creates a different order of spatial disorientation. On a raised platform that is enclosed on two sides by adjoining walls and directly visible from the exhibition's entrance lies a 35-foot-long Navajoesque rug patterned in vibrant black, orange, yellow and red. One wall carries a painted mural of a fiery desert sunset. On the other is a sconce and an adage establishing the perk that recommends each option for the afterlife: "Heaven for weather. Hell for company."