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

Smith has rolled out a carpet to welcome viewers to an apocalyptic skyscape that aptly invokes both Paradiso and Inferno. Elevated four steps, the salonlike area is literally a heightened space but evokes a portal into an uneasy yet beckoning hereafter. Smith seems to imply that her mock desert setting offers the best of both worlds, embracing the multiple identities of the Southwest, with its reputation for both natural splendor and social outcasts, for sunshine and neon.

Smith's smaller works rely on an intricacy and detail not feasible in the large experiential works. Usually no more than 3 feet wide, her recent collages boast over-the-top, custom-made mats and frames that emphasize the works' extreme self-consciousness and formal control. Despite their commercial and junk-shop sources, nothing is arbitrary or left to chance in Smith's rebuslike art. The collage elements intricately play off the metaphoric conceits or evocative turns of phrase of the elaborately lettered texts.

Smaller works feature in the multipart installation The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2000), the latest of Smith's several collaborations with L.A. poet Amy Gerstler (past literary inspirations include Borges, Kerouac and Chandler). The Sorcerer's Apprentice uses metaphors and narrative fragments suggested by fairy tales to deconstruct traditional female roles. The installation comprises seven sections, each juxtaposing Gerstler's words, fancifully lettered on the wall, with Smith's wall works and found and altered objects.

In the section titled "Swish," beneath Gerstler's poetic phrases, Smith installed a row of 40 brooms of various manufacture and states of wear, evoking a kind of police lineup of wallflower Cinderellas. On the opposite wall, text fragments conjuring witchcraft were interspersed with a Target store ad featuring a housewife astride an electric broom and the cover from an issue of Adult Video News depicting a broom-toting vixen in Halloween witch drag. The flip side of Cinderella's abjection proves to be the empowerment of the witch, whose broomstick provides a crafty way out of drudgery and coercion.

Smith's recent gallery exhibitions (at Margo Leavin in Los Angeles and Lawrence Rubin Greenberg Van Doren in New York) focused on the question of taste in mass culture, digging deeper into the theme of the wall work she installed in the Getty Center restaurant in 1997 [see A.i.A., May '98]. With a discriminating eye, Smith examines the specific connotations of texts and found materials, and reveals herself to be a philosopher of object-selection, probing conventional standards of beauty and worth.

Pure Beauty (1999), for example, juxtaposes a glossy studio close-up of a petulant baby with a vintage LP cover featuring a sultry photo of Marlene Dietrich. Seemingly in deference to Dietrich's lavish, sapphire jewelry, a single rhinestone teardrop has been applied to the baby's eye--perhaps also alluding to the glycerin tears of Man Ray's well-known photograph Larmes (Tears). A silkscreened text in ad-style typeface reads, "Without emotion, there is no beauty." Smith uses the contrast of the gorgeous crybaby and the affectless movie star to offer a kind of dialectical koan, probing such imponderables as the authenticity of a diva's emotions, childhood innocence and experience, and the enigma of Dietrich's iconic persona.