Sable Elyse Smith: Clockwork

The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce _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-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.