MONUMENTS TO THE ART OF LOSING

“I think the most consistent theme I use in my art is loss of innocence,” artist Alexis Smith said, sitting in her Venice studio. “I’m always interested in things that contain their opposites, that raise both the celebration and the heartache.”

A slender, articulate 36-year-old with short-cropped brown hair, Smith has forged a career creating collages coupling images with literary quotes.

She established herself with delicate collages crafted from notebook-sized colored paper and typewritten text. In her 15-year career, her works have ballooned to include painted murals, a granite monument in Buffalo, N.Y., and her most expansive enterprise to date, an 8,000-square-foot painted installation in a performing arts center in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Her current venture is four “mini monuments” being created for the MacArthur Park Public Arts Program, an ambitious project intended to rejuvenate the park through public art. Smith, with project director Al Nodal, is also working to rekindle six vintage neon signs on buildings surrounding the park by early next year.

According to Smith, the MacArthur Park pieces, to be placed around the pond during the next three months, “commemorate losers instead of winners, an emotional tone rather than an event.” Featuring quotes from detective novelist Raymond Chandler, the separate works will be oriented toward neon signs visible from the monuments.

The first piece installed is a terrazzo-and-brass inlay (similar to a star on Hollywood Boulevard), picturing two dancers with the phrase “Crazy as a pair of waltzing mice.” Other works are a granite marker to be embedded in the grass, picturing two boxers and the phrase “Mine was the better punch but didn’t win the wristwatch”; a bronze suitcase (which Smith hopes people will try to steal) with the quote, “She sat in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes” in raised letters, and a rectangular brass plaque (to be inset in a bench) featuring an outline of a general and the words, “He had a jaw like a park bench.”

Unraveling the layers of her art, Smith says that “ ‘Crazy’ is a description of a bag person. ‘Mine was the better punch . . . ‘ is a boxing image that also relates to things you give the old college try to--and you lose. The suitcase quote has an old-lady-trying-to-look-young kind of feel to it. Also, I think the suitcase is a metaphor for the itinerant peoples of the world, whether they be immigrants or bums or whatever. All those quotes have a double meaning, and, hopefully, the symbols can be understood by people even if they don’t speak English.

“All these things are intended to be appropriate metaphors of the unconventional situation of the park. If at some point the park should suddenly become very cleaned up and pristine, since they (the pieces) also allude to historic Los Angeles, they could also go back to being that. I hope they have enough metaphoric flexibility to mean all things to all people.

“I’ve gotten interested in real-life conventions that go with material, which means I’m not interested in sculpture,” she continued. “I’m interested in park benches, suitcases and monuments, things that exist in the real world that have meanings that can be played with because they’re recognizable.”