Alexis Smith uses found needlepoint and oil paintings as backdrops for her new collaged objects. The collages are customized to embellish and enrich the contents of the image.

The scavenged mementos that constitute Alexis Smith’s working material are sourced from thrift stores, swap meets and her own personal archive. Smith celebrates the narrative inherent in the history surrounding these castoff objects, forming a union between verbal and physical interpretation. For Smith found images, texts, and objects are understood to share a common vocabulary, part conceptual and part physical.

Postcards, Chinese take-out fortunes, and children’s toys obscure as well as amplify their new form. A postcard with the text, “You’re like Venus de Milo...beautiful but not all there”, hovers over the woven image of a Barbie ballerina, combined by the artist. In another room, a plastic medieval sword cuts the horizon of a large found landscape painting of the Grand Canal in Venice. The result plays with our romantic and nostalgic notions associated with cultural clichés, provoking common, shared memories. Smith favors nuance over a dictated position, romance over stricture.

The Alexis Smith exhibition is in collaboration with Honor Fraser Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.