Closures, Openings

Speaking of unarticulated narrative connections, Alexis Smith‘s first solo gallery show of new work in five years recently graced the walls at Margo Leavin. Riddled with semiotic leaks, Smith’s meticulous assemblages rival Karen Carson‘s work as the premier feminist modernist formalist language-based work being made by a woman artist in Los Angeles today! In contrast to Carson’s radical stylistic swings over the last few shows, Smith rests somewhat on her laurels. ”Words“ is absolutely what you would expect from an Alexis Smith show: immaculate layered arrangements of crisply isolated and exquisitely detailed pop detritus. Permeated with an arch intelligence expressed in a spare nouvelle cuisine vocabulary of interlocking one-liners (Martha Stewart meets Dorothy Parker) that has the unique effect of appearing simultaneously sharp and ambiguous, Smith‘s collages seem to make concise critiques about consumerism, gender, class, popular visual culture and the art world, only to break apart into shiny discontinuous facets upon closer inspection. Just when you think you’ve pegged a piece‘s meaning by the narrative resonance between an appropriated fragment of ad copy stenciled on the glass and the thrift-store painting beneath it, your eye is drawn to a visual echo set up by a glued-on hat or scrap of streetworn plastic. Again, as with Newkirk, ”privileging“ the senses while thwarting strict verbal pigeonholing results in fine art -- an infinitely more complex and open-ended can of worms than layout diva Barbara Kruger can manage in a whole retrospective.

Finally, if you’re at Bergamot to see Kori Newkirk, don‘t forget to check out the always eye-awakening color photographs of William Eggleston at the Gallery of Contemporary Photography; the recently uncovered, deeply reassuring Craig Kauffman hard-candy-color Bubbles in the backroom at Patricia Faure; the riveting, fascinatingly repulsive Imaginary Places II prints (with foam mesh, Op Art computer moires, and kidney-shaped cardboard cutouts swathed in garish fluorescents) by Frank Stella at Bobbie Greenfield. Alas, you just missed Terri Friedman’s Aspirations. A jolly, pathetic, kinetic site-specific inflatable in ”The Guard Shack“ at the entrance to the parking lot, Aspirations overcame its trendy (how far behind fashion can the art world fall?) ‘70s revivalism with its sample-happy ’90s impurity and guerrilla insouciance, bearing witness (alongside Lemon Sky) that the self-organizing grassroots artist community that spawned the late, lamented Dan Bernier Gallery is still kicking.