Review: Charlotte Smith at Cirrus Gallery

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Charlotte Smith’s moderately absorbing, slightly frustrating installation at Cirrus Gallery is called “THE UNTITLED SCRIPT OF The Janes’ childhood semidetached suburban nuclear family home pantry under the stairs, Acts I and II.” Yes, the installation is called a script. And to add to the confusion, the printed version of that script is subtitled, “A book performance.” The fluidity between disciplines is evocative, to a point.

The two environments that make up the installation appear to be a pair of stage sets, partially activated by the written or spoken word. In the large main gallery, a rug and three hanging wallpaper panels are incised with fragmented text, while additional projected snippets from the script scroll across the walls. In the side gallery, a makeshift hide-out made from a child’s bed frame, sheets and toys is overlaid by the sound of the artist’s voice in recorded monologue.

A sense of difficulty is intentional, a strategy to splinter narrative and muddle the roles of audience, subject and performer. One of the characters in the script, for instance, is named YOU. None of the elements is well enough developed, however, to elicit any real emotional or intellectual traction. The work is too much about its own conceptual genesis and not enough about anything else. The texts are too broken, the characters too elusive. The text-perforated wallpaper is an elegant take on the quip “If these walls could talk,” but the rest of the sculptural elements are too slight and unaltered to be interesting.

Smith, a recent master of fine arts graduate from UCLA, will close the show March 7 with a live performance.

-- Leah Ollman

Cirrus Gallery, 542 S. Alameda St., L.A., (213) 680-3473, through March 7. Closed Sundays and Mondays.

Above: ‘THE UNTITLED INSTALLATION OF THE SCRIPT OF THE Janes’ childhood semidetached suburban nuclear family home pantry under the stairs’ (2008), wallpaper with cutout letters. Credit: Robert Matsuda/Cirrus Gallery