Portfolio Review: Paige Smith's Urban Geodes Take Over the Streets

Paige Smith is a designer turned artist. Her art comes from the street, inspired by the cracks in the surface of downtown Los Angeles. She first drew attention with her unique three-dimensional "urban geode" installations and was approached to create an installation for The Box at The Standard, Hollywood. Since then, she's expanded to large-scale installations, galleries, and multimedia.

Each "geode" is puzzled together out of individual polyhedra that are made of hand folded, die-cut paper or roto-cast resin. The finished pieces seem to explode out of walls, frames, and cracks in the city. Each installation is a hidden treasure waiting to be discovered as people go about their daily routine. Her work has a palpable sense of "magical realism" that says, "Take a look around, notice the small things. Find wonder and beauty in the mundane."

Smith also is the Designer and Creative Director for the handbag line Vere Verto, which launched in July 2013.

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"This is a freestanding resin sculpture painted with black gloss. I named it Wandering, a play on creeping crystals and my experimental works."

"This piece is a 24x24x3.5 inches resin copper/gold painted piece. It's one of a series I did for the show 'Obsessed with Solitude' last winter. This piece is called Connected Alone."

"I created this paper installation last year for the month of June in the Box at The Standard in Los Angeles. I went rather intense and filled the Box from top to bottom, a total of 5x10 feet back and about 6x3 feet on both sides. The pieces were small for the space, and it took a month and a half of folding to create. I calculated over 5,000 pieces folded."

"This is the very first paper street art installation I created. It lasted about four months and lived in the Arts District in LA."

"This was the first complex shape I made for the street. The geode extended into the missing grout around where the brick used to be. Each piece was smaller than .25 inches for that area. This piece lasted only a few weeks. It was on an exposed corner and melted completely from the rain."

"These two pieces are over one-and-a-half years old and live in the outside wall of Daily Dose Cafe in the Arts District, LA. The more complex piece on top was created by taking a mold of the interior space and casting it with a thin cloth material."

"This is one of the largest street pieces I created. The first time you notice an empty phone booth, you keep seeing how many empty ones live in the street. The piece lasted around six months but was destroyed by people periodically ripping pieces out."

"This is my first geode that lives on the outside of a wall rather than inside. It was created with resin and installed last December in San Francisco. The piece still remains on the wall today."

"Another resin exterior piece, this one was installed in Madrid. I particularly love this one because I pre-made the piece, and when I took it out of my bag, it fit perfectly into the crack in the wall. It felt as though I discovered or uncovered a piece that was almost meant to be there."

"I installed this piece in Bali on a complex wall of a hotel that was crumbling on the outside. I lucked out while taking this photo and caught an old man walking down the street and collecting flowers."

"While installing another Bali geode, I was caught by a couple of kids on the street. They really loved the artwork and looked all around the piece, seemingly fascinated. One of them wanted his photo taken with it, and this is the result."