Sable Elyse Smith: Clockwork — Sable Elyse Smith

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to present Clockwork, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent work by Sable Elyse Smith, the 2026 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, on view September 24, 2026–February 13, 2027.

Following its presentation at The Contemporary Austin, FLAG reframes Clockwork by expanding its more cinematic elements into an immersive stage set environment, where video becomes an immediate means of visualizing unseen, ordinary violence. Including sculpture, video, neon, and photography, Clockwork interrogates the fundamental systems of power that define contemporary society, as well as their cultural and psychological impacts. Through formal strategies such as seriality and repetition, disorientation, and appropriation, Smith illustrates how systems of power not only overlap, but how they intertwine and mutually reinforce one another.

Clockwork features two video installations that signal moments of transition and pause within the exhibition. By layering found and original footage in LAUGH TRACK, OR WHO’S THAT PEEKING IN MY WINDOW(2021) and skin suit (2026)—created specifically for the Prize—Smith collages conflicting moments of suspense, humor, poetry, frustration, and pathos to expose personal and institutional biases. Both videos take their cues from harried police chase/bodycam footage popularized by reality shows such as Cops (1989-2020), whose cultural impact would and continues to shape televised entertainment in the U.S.

Evoking the mechanical precision of the systems from which they derive, Smith’s sculptures within the exhibition transform prison furniture in ways that show how repetition, doubling and layering can complicate, if not entirely obscure, the original meaning of their materials. In BARRICADE (2023), BARRIER (2023), and Riot III (2022), Smith repurposes the metal stools that populate prison waiting rooms into star-shaped forms reminiscent of Jacks, the childhood game; in Gravity (2022) and Vanilla Wafer (2023), those same stools project from the gallery walls to create unambiguously cruciform shapes—each offering different possible interpretation of systems of reward and punishment.

In Smith’s ongoing neon works, she turns an enduring interest in text into luminous forms, drawing on the aesthetics of institutional and commercial design to explore language as a psychological terrain. By playing with expectation and underscoring how language can, and so often is, used to reinforce prejudice and oppression, Smith also shows how it can be put to different, even liberatory uses. To further underscore the dissonance between image and language, Smith plays her Young Thug (2023) series throughout the exhibition, like musical notes. In this small-scale found photograph—framed and matted as if to exaggerate its gravity—a young white boy is shown wearing an American flag durag, cosplaying a trope of Black masculinity.

Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her creative practices span across video, performance, and the visual and literary arts. She has built a practice tracing the threads of violence and power embedded within systems of belief, infrastructure, language, intimacy, the quotidian, and beyond. She was recently included on the 2024 TIME100 Next—the magazine's annual list of 100 individuals shaping the future of their fields and defining the next generation of leadership. Her work has been featured at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; MoMA PS1; New Museum; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Institute of Contemporary Art Boston; and numerous others. In 2022, she was included in both the Whitney Biennial and the 59th Venice Biennale. Smith has received awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Creative Capital, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Fine Arts Work Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Art Matters, among others. In 2025, she was an artist-in-residence at the Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva, as well as BOFFO Fire Island.

Sable Elyse Smith: Clockwork is curated by Jonathan Rider, Director, with Caroline Cassidy, Deputy Director, The FLAG Art Foundation. The presentation at The Contemporary Austin was co-curated by Alex Klein, Head Curator & Director of Curatorial Affairs, and Julie Le, former Assistant Curator, The Contemporary Austin.