LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects is presenting 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.”
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. Smith is currently a professor at Columbia University School of the Arts, New York. She lives in New York and works in New Jersey.
Smith’s most comprehensive solo museum exhibition to date, Clockwork, is on view at the FLAG Art Foundation, New York until February 13, 2027, having travelled from The Contemporary Austin. The artist’s first institutional monograph will be co-published by The Contemporary Austin, The FLAG Art Foundation, and Dancing Foxes Press in early 2027 to accompany the exhibition. Other solo exhibitions include the Haggerty Museum, Milwaukee (2018); Atlanta Contemporary (2018); and the Queens Museum (2017).
In Los Angeles, July 2027, The Industry will present If you unfolded us, an opera Smith co-created with David Dominique that debuted in Studio Sound: Sable Elyse Smith at the Museum of Modern Art, NY (2024). Smith has performed at the New Museum, New York (2019, 2015, and 2012); The Studio Museum in Harlem (2018); The Poetry Project, New York (2017); MoMA PopRally, New York (2017); and Queens Museum (2014); among others.
Her work was featured in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, the 2022 Whitney Biennial, Quiet as It’s Kept; and notable group exhibitions such as Going Dark: The Contemporary Figure at the Edge of Visibility, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2023–2024); Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America conceived by Okwui Enwezor, New Museum (2021); and many others.
Awards and honors include the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize (2026); TIME100 Next (2024); Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship (2023); Studio Museum in Harlem Artist in Residence (2018); New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Program in Film and Media (2017); Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists (2016).
Her work is in institutional collections, including The Brooklyn Museum; Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, WI; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach; Prez Art Museum Miami; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA.
