For over 40 years, Alexis Smith has made collages and installations that explore the deeper meanings behind popular culture. She usually begins with nostalgic images—ranging from thrift-store finds to iconic advertisements—and combines them with poetic and poignant texts. Her juxtapositions of word and image are usually understated but are always witty, perceptive, and provocative. They force us to rethink things we accept as familiar and in the process reveal the powerful role that images and culture have in shaping our lives.

This exhibition focuses on key works from the 1980s, juxtaposed with more recent pieces. The centerpiece is Past Lives (1989) a room-sized installation created with poet Amy Gerstler that recreates a mythical American elementary school classroom. This psychically charged stage set features over sixty historic children's chairs, collected by the artist for decades. Enigmatic texts on the walls read like excerpts from a report-card or employee review. These empty chairs remind us of the countless lives shaped in school rooms like this and allude to the complicated feelings—ranging from hope to regret—that emerge in our recollections of childhood.

The collage works in this exhibition, dating from 1976 to the present, were chosen to focus on universal but particularly timely subjects such as the Media, Gender, and Power. Mean Streets (1980) and Daily Planet (1986) use references to real and fictitious newspapers to reflect on how "factual" information can be used to distort, misinform, and manipulate. Especially poignant works such as I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1982), A Girl with Brains Ought To… (1983), My Fair Lady (1985) and Peaches (1990) expose how common clichés of everyday language support and reinforce female subservience. Eight Ball (1988) and Modernism (2002) remind us that the drive for material success is a trap that often blinds us to the real pleasures of life.