La Cienega Area

Alexis Smith has grown from a precious and precocious local spinner of delicate collaged insights to an artist of national reputation making conceptual supergraphic installations. All along she has maintained a marked fondness for literature which still shows in a current exhibition inspired by Jack Kerouac’s classic Beat Generation novel “On the Road.”

Some 20 large collages are a jumble of old posters, calendar art, magazine clippings and objects from arrows to baseballs. As usual, Smith transforms her source and this time the results are a troubled rumination on trashed dreams. Taken together the works seem to say that the Beats’ aspirations were losers’ longings sloshing around in a schlock reality.

Smith used to find magic in literary memory. This show betrays an angry disillusionment with nostalgia even as it struggles to rekindle its magic.

In general, it comes off much better than her initial attempts to work in larger scale. There is a wry enchantment in “Seven Wonders” with its motto, “Everything amazed him, everything he saw” placed next to a tin poster for Camel cigarettes and a kimonoed Japanese charmer bowling, of all things. There is dark beauty in the composition around “Dense mothlike eternity brooded in that crazy brown parlor.”

Rattling romantic disillusion comes out of “Jail Bait,” “Desolation Angel” and a composition where James Dean is cast as a gay wanderer in search of sailors. The Beats’ religious quest fairs no better amid post-card madonnas and rocks of ages no holier than calendar landscapes. The art is soberingly tough and unblinking. Maybe more than it wants to be. It seems it wishes it could remember how it used to create itself invisibly somewhere between the words and the pictures. (Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., to April 23.)