Alexis Smith

Alexis Smith + Amy Gerstler @ Honor Fraser, Jul 16 – Aug 27

15 July 2016

Alexis Smith is presenting solo exhibition The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, with Amy Gerstler at Los Angeles’ Honor Fraser, opening July 16 and running to August 27.

The LA-based artist takes Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s late-eighteenth-century poem of the same name —via Walt Disney Studio’s musical interpretation in 1940 animated feature-film Fantasia —as the focus of an investigation into cultural memory across time and place. Combining Smith’s collection of idiosyncratic second-hand brooms, pop cultural references and wall drawings with LA-based poet Gerstler’s moving, circuitous texts responding to the work, the exhibition explores the the “violent connotations of the verb ‘to sweep’.”

Using the surreal, familiar and the funny —a thing the press release describes as a quality that’s “uniquely Californian” —Smith’s layered temporal and cultural references continue her ongoing work dissecting “the motivations and anxieties that constitute everyday life in America”.

See the Honor Fraser website for details.**

Alexis Smith, The Sorcerer's Apprentice (2016). Exhibition view. Installation view. Courtesy Honor Fraser, Los Angeles..
Alexis Smith, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (2016). Exhibition view. Installation view. Courtesy Honor Fraser, Los Angeles.
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