Amanda M. Smith, a recent MFA graduate of San Jose State University, presents her debut solo show of ceramic works on view at Jack Fischer Gallery.  These are absolutely exquisite, fairytale-like scenes, featuring a pastel palette, dollhouse vignettes and girly flowers blooming from intricately shaped and layered trees.  Her ceramic paintings are inhabited by hordes of blonde little girls with Victorian dresses, bearing an inescapable similarity to Henry Darger's Vivian girls, yet Smith's characters seem a bit more world-weary, less optimistic, and less noble.  Despite the cheery palette and flowery details, each painting shows a scene of besiegement, violent take over and occupation, some with anachronistic elements like chainsaws and Hummers.  For instance in the piece Hummer Procession ,her imperialistic little girls are armed with rifles popping out of the top of a consumer-class Hummer limo, accompanied by a parade of girls with trumpets and drums, marching through a miniature village, approaching a castle-like structure, as if surveying a land recently occupied. 

This theme of imperialism-in-miniature is present through all her works, with scale being the symbolic factor--different sizes representing different hierarchies.  But, the aggressor and the victim aren't always clearly identified.  In Outnumbered, seven brooding blonde girls, crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in a tiny house, wait idly as an army ,of Lilliputian proportions, sieges the house, scaling the walls and slipping in through the chimney.  In Flight of the Little Girls, however, the threatening actor is the oversized little girl, terrifying the denizens of an intricate Indian palace-dollhouse.  The look on the girl's face is one of rather disappointed chagrin, as if her intentions were misunderstood, just as one of the dollhouse's defensive inhabitants prepares to strike her on her enormous forefinger.

Smith's use of the dollhouse as a diorama for the action and drama of her paintings is well-suited to the medium of ceramics, as each piece, carved from a slab of clay measuring about fourteen inches square, has a very satisfying "object-ness" about it.  Narratives sometimes flow between the pieces, but each presents its own compact little world with its own architecture and history, its own implications and devastations.

--Natalie Stanchfield 

(*Images, from top to bottom:  Amanda Smith, Candy Garden and Sparkling Sabers, May 17 - June 28, 2008; Jack Fischer Gallery, Outnumbered, ceramic, 14 x 14.5", courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco.  Amanda Smith, Candy Garden and Sparkling Sabers, May 17 - June 28, 2008; Jack Fischer Gallery, Hummer Procession, ceramic, courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco.  Amanda Smith, Candy Garden and Sparkling Sabers, May 17 - June 28, 2008; Jack Fischer Gallery, Palace, courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco.  Amanda Smith, Candy Garden and Sparkling Sabers, May 17 - June 28, 2008; Jack Fischer Gallery, Chainsaw, courtesy of Jack Fischer Gallery, San Francisco.)