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.

Alexis Smith was born in 1949 in Los Angeles, where she lives today. She received a BA from University of California, Irvine in 1970. One person exhibitions of Smith's work have been mounted at the Athenaeum Music & Arts Library, La Jolla, CA (2015); University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie, WY (2003); Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA (2000); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (1997); J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA (1997); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1991); and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (1991). Her work has been included in nearly 200 thematic exhibitions, including recently Los Angeles: A Fiction, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France and Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, Norway (2016-2017); Forms of Identity: Women Artists in the 90s, Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA (2017); Chapters: Book Arts in Southern California, Craft & Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Drawing in L.A.: the 1960s and 70s, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2014); Under the Big Black Sun: California Art 1974-1981, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA (2011); and elles@centrepompidou, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France (2009). Smith has completed several major public commissions, including a mural for the Las Vegas Central Library; terrazzo floors at the Jerome Schottenstein Center at The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH; and a site specific installation for The Stuart Collection, University of California, San Diego in La Jolla, CA. Her work is included public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY.

Greg Colson presents an exhibition of wall reliefs and installations. Colson’s art is marked by the jarringly direct way he commingles material and conceptual elements. In his constructions, precisely rendered systems are disrupted by the contexts they are placed in. While in many respects abstract, Colson’s works are titled to allude to an inventory of real world activities we humans engage in to get through the day – be it self-reflection (“Yacht Model of Integrity”), swiping right (“New Apple Headquarters”), or recreational drinking (“Pub Crawl”). By drawing out the poetry and humor in our social patterns, Colson seems to suggest there are limits to – and hazards inherent in – our obsession with efficiency, data, and analysis of every kind.

Greg Colson lives and works in Los Angeles. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and Europe, including solo exhibitions at Patrick Painter Inc., Los Angeles; Sperone Westwater, New York; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Galleria Cardi, Milan; Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf; Kunsthalle Lophem, Bruges; Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome; Baldwin Gallery, Aspen; and the Lannan Museum, Lake Worth, FL. His works are in public and private collections internationally including: the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Panza Collection, Varese, Italy; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; and Sammlung Rosenkranz, Berlin.