Alexis Smith Featured in The New Yorker

Though she rose to prominence alongside her fellow Los Angeles ironists Chris Burden and Jack Goldstein, this is the first New York show in eleven years of Smith’s mordant assemblages. Chief among her themes is the gap between the promise of the American Dream and its reality, which she dramatizes through juxtaposition. An album cover in which Elvis sports a ballpoint mustache is collaged onto a photograph of riflemen in balaclavas. A wig, in the style a delegate might have worn to the Continental Congress, shares a frame with a caustic quote from “Dr. Strangelove” about the American military: “I don’t say we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but I do say no more than ten or twenty million people killed.”

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