Sable Elyse Smith takes on systems of power defining contemporary society
The FLAG Art Foundation presents “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 from September 24, 2026 through 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.
About Sable Elyse Smith
A New York-based interdisciplinary artist, Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles) employs sculpture, photography and text to examine systems of language, power and visibility that shape daily life. Her work has been presented at MoMA PS1, the New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, among others.
Most recently, in 2024, Smith unveiled a new theatrical and video installation opera as a part of The Museum of Modern Art’s Studio Sound series, which highlights artists exploring sound and music. In 2022, she participated in both the Whitney Biennial and the 59th Venice Biennale.
Smith has received awards from Creative Capital, the Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation and Art Matters.
She currently serves as Associate Professor of Visual Art at Columbia University
About The Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize
First established in 2016, the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize is a biennial award honoring an artist selected by a rotating, independent advisory committee of leading curators and art historians.
Since expanding in 2018 to include The FLAG Art Foundation, the prize now comprises a $200,000 award, a solo exhibition premiering at The Contemporary Austin and traveling to The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, an accompanying publication, and public programming.
The prize honors artists of exceptional achievement with established exhibition records, those whom the committee believes merit wider recognition, and for whom the award can serve as a transformative opportunity.
