Alexis Smith, The Holy Road

Written by USU Student Nick Lammay

May 20, 2016

Alexis Smith (born 1949) is an assemblage and collage artist working in Los Angeles, California. Smith attended the University of California, Irvine under the instruction of world renowned artist Robert Irwin and Vija Clemins and graduated with a BA in 1970. Upon graduation Smith’s work quickly became associated with West Coast Assemblage Art and Beat Culture, grouping her with artists such as Edward Kienholz, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner. Smith considers herself a product of Hollywood, often pairing leftovers of Tinsel Town kitsch—recycled thrift-store book jackets, advertisements, and Hollywood memorabilia—with snippets of folk wisdom and homespun clichés.

The Holy Road is a collage, consisting of found objects, confined within the boundaries of large wooden picture frame. Thick, wavy black stripes made of a felt like material, suggests tire treads as they run diagonally over the frame onto the collage. This makes the frame as important as what it contains. The background is made of car ads, maps and newspaper clippings about new roads being built. One of the few areas with color is a print of the Virgin Mary and Child, placed in the upper left portion of the collage, overlapped slightly by the black stripes. Two plastic snakes appear to be moving across the newspaper clippings, taking the viewers eye to points of interest, one even making its way onto the frame. In the upper right corner a quote reading “Whats your road, man? holybly road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road, It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow” is illustrated in gold.

Inspiration for "The Holy Road" came from Smith’s reading of Jack Kerouac’s beatnik classic On the Road, a semi-autobiographical novel about Kerouac’s travels with another Beat literary, Neal Cassady. The book looks at traditional Western Christian ideas of the promised land and how people leave one place in search of someplace better.[3] Smith, fascinated by this search for a promised land, appropriated Kerouac’s ideas of a religious journey into her collage.

This month's From the Vault is part of an object-based research assignment from Professor Marissa Vigneault's course ARTH 4900-4900 Curating as Art history, Art History as Curating.