Object Lessons From the Smaller World of Smith

Titled “Words to Live By,” Alexis Smith’s first solo show in nearly five years puts individuals before institutions. Although the veteran Los Angeles-based Conceptual artist has recently completed large public projects for the Getty Center’s restaurant and Ohio State University’s sports arena, she has not abandoned art’s one-on-one intimacy in favor of the faceless authority of institutional sponsorship.

At Margo Leavin Gallery, 13 modestly scaled collages and a mural-size picture demonstrate that it is infinitely more interesting to be a discerning consumer--no matter what your disposable income--than to believe that every commercial exchange is a form of capitalist exploitation. Almost all of Smith’s works begin with cheap items she buys at thrift stores and flea markets. Grocery store advertisements, commercially printed images, hand-painted signs and even the fake velvet lining of a display case form the backdrops of her spunky wall-works.

To these castoff byproducts of commercial culture Smith affixes the covers of women’s magazines from the 1940s and ‘50s, a Marlene Dietrich LP and a dust jacket from Amy Vanderbilt’s “Everyday Etiquette.” Lest viewers mistake the artist’s fondness for mid-century manners as simple nostalgia, her sharp-witted pieces include such tacky souvenirs as a rabbit’s foot, an emblem from the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club, a motel sewing kit, a trophy of a horse’s backside and an ad for a nose-hair clipper.

Set in recessed frames, Smith’s odd constellations of recycled mementos become shallow dioramas whose theatrical flair invites viewer participation. Profoundly optimistic (and classically American), her brand of image-and-text Conceptualism represents the flip side of Barbara Kruger’s, whose intentionally bombastic exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art focuses on the power stereotypes hold over all of us.

In contrast, Smith’s willfully idiosyncratic objects insist that stereotypes only go so far, and that art is most interesting when it gives physical form to details and otherwise indescribable peculiarities. Resonating against the ongoing drama of everyday life, her scrappy works speak the language of desire and satisfaction--of not merely longing for something better, but of going out of your way to get it, even if it has to be pieced together from whatever leftovers you can get your hands on.

* Margo Leavin Gallery, 812 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 273-0603, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Space Exploration: Five years ago, Uta Barth made a breakthrough body of work by photographing the space between things in sparsely furnished interiors. Since then, she has made similar, seemingly out-of-focus color photographs of urban and rural landscapes, giving blurry form to trees, buildings and automobiles, all the better to capture on film what we usually think of as the empty space between them.

At ACME Gallery, a new body of work titled “nowhere near” puts these two sides of Barth’s art together. Focusing on the spaces between interiors and exteriors, this meditative series of smartly framed prints depicts the views on both sides of the windows of the artist’s Culver City apartment. Shot morning, noon and night during the winter, spring and summer, the nearly 3-by-4-foot photographs invite viewers to look at them and through them, just as actual windows do.

In one single-panel piece made on an overcast day, the droplets of water that cling to Barth’s window seem to have more substance and tangibility than all of the yellowed grass, unidentifiable fruit trees and indistinct hedges in her backyard. In other works, Barth positions the camera so close to the windows that their panes are not visible. When she does this she uses a diptych format, which emphasizes that each view of the outside world is contingent upon her movements inside her living room.

The only triptych treats the outdoors as an incidental backdrop for a seemingly sustained meditation on the grid formed by windowpanes. The only nighttime diptych allows the windows to function as mirrors, revealing the room and hall behind Barth’s camera. In another glare-filled pair of prints, the exterior and interior spaces fuse, as afternoon sunlight pours into her apartment; the windows, their panes and frames appear to dissolve in blinding brightness.

Ultimately, Barth’s photographs are less concerned with exploring the literal qualities of her apartment’s windows than using them as metaphors for her art’s capacity to get inside your head. Extremely successful in eliciting daydreams, her work also demonstrates that the world drifts out of focus whenever we get inside our own heads and really get thinking.

* ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (323) 857-5942, through Nov. 13. Closed Sundays and Mondays.