SKY FENCE GROUND

Regen Projects is pleased to announce a solo exhibition with Sable Elyse Smith, presenting new woven works on paper, a recent video work, and a monumental kinetic sculpture. SKY FENCE GROUND enlists and disrupts the language of formalism to mine the latent meanings of visual systems, patterning, and the destabilization of structure. Smith engages with the aesthetic gestures of shorthand, repetition, and distortion to expose the underlying logic of conceptual mechanisms and hierarchies. In Smith's multimedia practice, she recontextualizes signifiers of systemic oppression to illuminate omnipresent structures of power and inequity. In this new series of works on paper, Smith slices and interweaves her Coloring Books (developed from an activity book designed to teach children about the judicial process) into an overlapping grid. She purposefully distorts the recognizable Minimalist idiom through an aesthetic discordance and the imperfection of the squares. Visually oscillating between abstraction and representation, these woven works disrupt the coherence of the coloring book scenes to unmask their function as a mechanism for structuring society. Through the literal deconstruction and exhaustion of the image, Smith's gesture is both subtractive and additive, revealing the absurdity of the source material while dismantling the expected material hierarchy of figure and ground. In the post-minimalist sculpture A Clockwork (2021), presented at the 2022 Whitney Biennial and the artist's 2026 solo exhibition at The Contemporary Austin, Smith repeats the form of prison tables and stools to construct a Ferris wheel. The work presents an uncomfortable harmony between insipid reality and a symbol of entertainment, working in tandem to make visible a system that operates "like clockwork." Smith materializes the ritualized violence and circularity of the American carceral system through the sculpture's slow and relentless rotation. Smith describes the work as structurally anchored "On the duration of time, on doing time, on banality and enclosure, on the trap of language, on the shape of things, on an atmosphere which at times can only be registered by the body's sensorial awareness of a thickness in the air, a thickness in the room, of a suffocating humidity. A clockwork." In the new video work skin suit (2026), which debuted at the artist's traveling exhibition Clockwork at The Contemporary Austin and the FLAG Art Foundation in New York, Smith provides a visual bricolage of police chase and bodycam footage popularized as entertainment by reality shows such as Cops. Smith's video illustrates the way in which racialized violence is choreographed, replayed, repeated, and enacted, through a collage of conflicting moments that evoke suspense, humor, pathos, and poetry. Rizvana Bradley writes of the work, "...what Smith affords the viewer, in the fray between the synchronous and asynchronous, is the chance to consider what emerges in the space between the images that express the impetus to repetition. This unsynchronized, liminal space is where the time of clocks might be abolished altogether."