experiments

experiment 1 taking everyday recongnizable found objects made with glass, wine and beer bottles, and connecting them with the glass of crushed wine and beer bottles, and/or silica sand, one of the essientail substances of glass, and a binding agent, the first attemps using wax and the subsequent attempts using resin.
1

2

3

in the collage of Alexis smith, she is taking the everday, objects and building her narratives from the made layer, the 1st models are an attempt to collage a re-volution from made object to essiential material of glass, just as the e-volution of the glass object has been the process of essiential material to objectified object.

continuing the process making grid of plexi-glass, with cut groves, to suspend layers of, (tile 1) chalk and sand in resin (tile 2) crushed glass in resin, (tile 3) coloured stained glass, idea of creating visual, and spatial depth the idea of a tile. It also corresponds to the idea of layering, the technique of collage using the layering of object and imagery to build narrative.

introducing a plexi glass floor framework and creating various tiles that express the various stages of the first process separately, from tiles with suspended sands and chalks, essiental materials of glass, to layering of coloured glass. these tiles each show a visual connection through the floor, to the intended ground layer below.

tile 1 inversion

tile 2 inversion

tile 3 inversion

while building the plexi- glass frame for the stained glass layered tiles the material process revealed another layering system when compressing multiple layers together for the effiecient cutting of the groves for the overlapping intersections of the frame. when offsetting the groves, flipping some of the groves so that they face down, and given some of the different depths of the layers, a very beautiful pattern of light intensity and shawdow is revealed in the glass, when it is illuminated from below.

integrating strips of plywood

some sketches of the process

Smiths Work

Alexis smith is an American artist, who uses her art to critique, and narrate sensations, memories and new meanings of American culture, through collage. Although her work has touched on various aspects of American in general, it is often focused in Hollywood and Los Angeles, at the threshold between, the extraordinary life of the celebrity, and that of the ordinary everyday. She is fascinated with Hollywood’s culture, its influence, and life in proximity to it. Alexis employ’s the iconographic, mass media, everyday objects and images, with text clichés or the inquisitive portrayal’s by great American authors, politicians and poets to connect a deeper meaning in her narratives, often laced with a satirical and or witty humour to convey her message.
Within the scope of her work she has, developed different themes and uses of the medium from single mixed media text-image collages, narratives in a series, magazine spreads in House and Garden, to exhibition’s that challenge, frame and space, isolating narratives and sub narratives at different scales, integrating the inhabited space of the gallery to, the small wall mounted narratives in series and symbolic meanings within each. She has also extended her art, to the interiors, floor design commissions to the landscape.
Alexis Smith is not a painter or a sculptor, but essentially a graphic artist, combining the mediums of found objects, magazine and news paper clippings, text and image. She sees text and image as inseparable.

image + text

“inspired by texts as well as found images, smith evokes a state between idea and sensation. Reading and seeing are harnessed into a single, synaesthetic activity.”

“She unites thought and physical perception, relying on eye and memory to make synthesis”…”most successful when otherwise unrelated thoughts and objects are seamlessly melded together, when fragments from our mental and physical lives are reunited”

Along with the consistent use of collage, smith has reoccurring themes, in her work. She tries to understand the female, role, between the liberated, success driven, career prototype, and the one needing love and meaningful relationships. She sees the female as a powerful sexual object of desire and is aware her need to control it and use it. She also ultilizes, playing cards, the snake, stars, movie stars, and musical notation repetitively in different pieces. These all have symbolic power to smith, a power that can direct a narrative, due to there collective meaning.

single panel collage

"a boys life"

collage in a series creating a linear narrative
glad sad

song at a party

bad photo sorry

chandlerisms

"quote"

"quote"

disjunctive collage, each individual in the collage, overlaying person with, thier own ideal of the american dream.

use of frame as an integral part of the collage

"quote"

spatial college. transforming gallery spaces into part of the exihibit, extending the integral frame into the inhabited space of the viewer

cultural critique, in "house and garden magazine", the everyday american living room with mapping north america which comes together from one focal point. perhaps a sardonic view of the homogenaity of surburban america.

ON Hollywood

jutaposition of the liife of the star, the lime light, and the average losangleno. the border of this, real and surreal world

ON female

"Dick and Jane Series" the everyday women on cover of life magazine

"quote"

ecological critques

"quote"

america the vacation country

the mediated world

interiors
"the grand"

Landscape and floors

Analysis

Ultimately smith’s collages and their overt use of the everyday and pop-culture) but very local culture to her) symbolism can be interpreted as a kind of inverse archeology, one that rather then using a deductive process to reveal, and uncover the artifacts in history, and reconnect patterns and relationships of the past to create meaning, it uses the inductive process of taking already, exposed, defined artifacts, in terms of there collective meaning and iconographic power to further connect new meanings.

Karl Popper states that there are 3 interconnected worlds
objective world 1- material, natural, physical properties, weight energy motion rest
subjective world 2- consciousness, intentions, calculations, feelings, thoughts, dreams
world 3 – world of objective public structures-not necessarily-intentional products of mind. These are the abstract informational forms of social organization; language, mathematics law, religion, philosophy, art, all programs, like physical libraries. The made world
Collage, uses then 3rd world this re-presented world as its substance, particularly collage that utilizes, symbolic, objectified objects, images and text. The more, recognizable and more universally understood the object is the more, refined and hence defined the meaning or association of that or with that object becomes.
-then new substance, material, the made, informational forms, can be looked at as an additional, transfered, pre-processed layer, an additional resource at our disposal.
Los Angeles, in fact America is a sea, of the made, the symbolized of signs, signs make up the general abundance of the urban fabric, it is there culture.

“growing up in L.A. she lived her life at the epicenter of culture, in which vision is prized above all other senses…..she experienced L.A. as a continuous pandemonium of the “”buy, sell, act, do”” advertisements that effectively obliterate its commercial landscape of two and three storey storefronts and the commercial studded cacophony and ceaseless replays of popular music on am radio”

Not to mention that LA and Orange county is an entirely fabricated place, that begins with it its natural climate being a desert and the water, being transported in to create a green space.
The more we make as a species, the larger the transferred substance (material) becomes.
If we think of the surface of the earth, as the breaking point between archeology and inverse archeology, one removing layers to find history, or the past, the other, adding new meanings to history, we can incorporate this experience, into floor perhaps using the floor the ground floor espically as a metaphor for revealing, be adding layers and at the same time, using the materially of glass to filters then made layer, revealing and perhaps excavating into the earth revealing, the further layers of natural sediment.
How can the floor perhaps create this awareness of the made layer over the natural. How can the glass floor be something, like a geological core machine