Turn Things Over
Sable Elyse Smith
Through the subtle background buzz and painful glare of neon lights, the eerie juxtaposition of a Ferris wheel composed of prison waiting-room furniture, or the strange logic of a children’s book about interacting with the judicial system, artist Sable Elyse Smith interrogates how violence is normalized. Since she was a child, the artist has been driven by the instinct to take things apart and discover how they work, and now applies her analytical curiosity to the machinery of incarceration. From her New Jersey studio and BOFFO Fire Island Pines residency to a career-spanning exhibition at The Contemporary Austin, this documentary short follows the artist as she transforms the language and materials of institutional power structures, like the carceral system, into a body of work that highlights systemic harms that are often overlooked. “I stumbled upon the world of art, but always had a desire to think critically and long and then find ways to put that information back out into the world,” says the artist. “My impulse is to make and turn things over and use materials [and] images to process the world and communicate.”
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Sable Elyse Smith was born in 1986 in Los Angeles and lives and works in New York City. The artist received her BA from Oglethorpe University in 2011 and her MFA from Parsons, The New School for Design in 2013. Through texts presented in blinding neon, a Ferris wheel sculpture composed of prison furniture, and images ripped from children’s activity books about the carceral system, Smith explores how violence is embedded in built environments, social relations, and linguistic structures. Across her practice, the artist reuses and misuses materials, particularly those drawn from the prison-industrial complex, to create a body of work that questions how specific narratives are constructed, internalized, and repeated.
