Snake Path, 1992
Since the 1970's, Alexis Smith has been known for innovative collages alluding to the "nostalgic" eras of the recent past. In these works, Smith combines fragments from the mass media-like magazine covers or dust jackets of the forties with a wide range of kitsch and found objects. Often she has organized several collages into sequences, implying a coherent narrative. As in a film, related fragments of text (almost a "soundtrack") link one collage to another. Smith has also painted large motifs directly onto a gallery's walls and then hung her smaller framed works on this mural-like background. In this way she succeeds in transforming the art space itself into a collage. In recent years Smith has expanded this impulse to work environmentally doing many installations including the entire floor of the Los Angeles Convention Center as well as projects for Cleveland and Seattle.
Smith's work for the Stuart Collection alludes to the complex relationship between nature and culture or, in the context of the university, between knowledge and the landscape. Her Snake Path consists of a winding 560-foot-long, 10-foot-wide footpath tiled in the form of a serpent whose head ends at the terrace of the Central Library. The tail wraps around an existing concrete pathway as a snake would wrap itself around a tree limb. Along the way, the serpent's slightly rounded body passes a monumental granite book carved with a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost. The snake then circles around a small tropical garden representing Eden. These pointed allusions to the biblical conflict between innocence and knowledge mark an apt symbolic path to the university's main repository of books. The concept of finding sanctuary within oneself - outside the idealistic and protected confines of the university - speaks directly to the student on the verge of entering the "real world."
Smith lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work makes a major contribution to the recent and widespread artistic effort to articulate and re-evaluate the ideological formations of mass culture, and, as the Snake Path dramatizes, the collection and production of so-called classical knowledge.
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