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Making extensive use of found images, Alexis Smith peels the veneer from society’s alluring lies. She is “basically interested in the culture’s mythology” she says, “and the difference between [that and] people’s real experience.”¹

“I’ve died so often—made love so much—I’ve lost track of what’s real,” a series of prints (The Twentieth Century, 1983) proclaims. Smith’s entire career, launched in the early seventies, has centered on this consummate twentieth century conundrum.

Charlie Chan, 1973-1974, is a rare example of a work incorporating photographs made specifically for the purpose. The color pictures are of Smith, playing various emotional roles for the camera (we know they are roles because the pictures vaguely mimic the publicity still from a Charlie Chan film). The lesson of the piece? That “successful creators” differ from certified schizo-phrenics only “in that they have learned the disguises and dissimulations required by the world-as-it-is.”

1. Peter Kirby (director), Alexis Smith: Life in America (New York: Media Art Services and Whitney Museum of American Art, 1991). Videotape. ↩︎