Producing Legibility with Sable Elyse Smith

Sable Elyse Smith speaks with Samaira Wilson about her current solo exhibition, Clockwork, at The Contemporary Austin. Smith discusses fictions of legibility, mechanisms of power, material-object relationships, and intellectual productions of art.

Earlier this month, The Contemporary Austin opened Clockwork, a solo exhibition presenting Sable Elyse Smith, recipient of the 2026 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize.

Clockwork brings together a selection of career-defining works, anchored by A Clockwork (2021), first presented in the Whitney Biennial 2022, which stands as Smith’s largest sculpture to date: a slow-moving kinetic Ferris wheel assembled from prison waiting room furniture that visualizes the entanglement of spectacle with the constant churn of the carceral state. Smith’s concern with language, perception, and institutional control extends through ongoing neon works, which translate text into gleaming sculptural forms by drawing on the aesthetics of commercial design, and continues in a curated selection from her Coloring Book paintings, where re-contextualised pages from a found children’s colouring book point to the intertwined logics of the justice and educational systems. These ideas are further developed in two video works composed from both found and original footage, which draw on the visual tropes of police chases popularised by reality television programs such as Cops, exploring how such imagery has shaped decades of televised entertainment in the United States.

Together, these works underscore the precision of Smith’s conceptually driven practice, which examines systems of power as material infrastructures embedded with psychological and cultural conditions that often operate in plain sight, predicting and perpetuating the narratives that structure our reality. Building on the legacies of post-minimalism and conceptual art, Smith produces legibility in how these narratives are constructed, internalised, and sustained. The title Clockwork itself evokes the mechanical precision of such cyclical, seemingly inevitable, and frequently imperceptible systems, emphasizing their quiet yet persistent force.

Samaira Wilson: Do you have any mantras you’re living by right now?

Sable Elyse Smith: Let’s see. I’m unsure if it was just something that I conjured, or if it came from a conversation. But for a while, I walked around with a sticky note in my pocket that said, go beyond everything you thought was possible. That has definitely been a mantra at various times in my life that has allowed me to take stock and reimagine different things, different possibilities, in many different contexts of life. 

SW: How did you come to realize that systems of power and structures of society are like fiction? 

SES: By paying attention, by being a black person, lived experience. I mean… It’s funny, and I guess there have been many different layers of recognition throughout time. But I was having a conversation with this publisher last night. We were talking about education because she’s working on a book that has this intersection with education. She was asking me how I came to work in these various educational spaces, and I remember there was one distinct experience. Eventually once I got to grad school, I was confronted by the fact that a lot of my peers in the program had wildly different educational experiences than I had, and their experiences were incredibly more resourced than mine. It’s not to say that there haven’t been important moments across my education, but I’ve gone through many different types of schools. I can remember that awareness was really jarring to me.

I think that also opened another layer of thinking about other types of systems or structures that govern our lives, and how they try to predict or perpetuate certain outcomes or narratives for various types of people depending on how these systems are seeing you. Obviously, I was aware of the carceral space but my thinking expanded, as I understood prison was a system. Systems organize our world, so there must be other oppressive structures that facilitate these narratives around people which asserts the systems necessity. And I could see this play out in different educational spaces. I think that was shocking, because you’re told education is how one succeeds, creates a life for themselves, or is able to move beyond other systems. There are these myths loaded into the space and ideas that don’t unbound it from the structures it was created under.

SW: I totally understand, yeah. So, your goal or approach is to expose these things for what they are?

SES: Yes, definitely exposure, and maybe make them more legible in a way. The things that I’m interested in are the things that are camouflaged, the things that aren’t exactly legible. So, if it’s not exposing something, it’s about tuning a viewer’s attention differently. So that, when we look, we start to sharpen our looking, and we’re looking at these different things which helps create a kind of fluency that is more layered and complex.  A knowledge that allows us to unravel gestures that purposely try to obfuscate what their real function or what their real intentionality is. 

SW: As a multidisciplinary artist who has worked with writing, installation, photo, video, sculpture, and painting. Which medium is most powerful to wield for you? 

SES: It’s an interesting question. I guess it’s all contextual for me. Each of these different outputs also have different scales of distribution, right? So, if we think about writing, you can put a text online or you can publish a book. There’s a different kind of speed and scale as it relates to one’s ability to access that information. If I put a painting in a gallery, maybe that scale of access is a lot more limited. Making a song, right, has a different type of scale of impact. So, for me, what’s important is understanding all those different types of access points, the context, and the legibility around how people interact with those forms, how people interpret them, and how people collide with them. Then deciding what information I want to put in that form, and how the accumulation of all these different forms creates a  web of complexity. Existing at these different skills, speeds, and scales. I think that’s kind of fascinating. 

SW: What does visibility mean to you and how do you go about engineering it and using it as a tool?

SES: Hmm. I mean, I’m not exactly interested in visibility, but I am interested in the fictions of legibility. All the ways that I think about making, or the materials that I use, my research, are about adapting or appropriating material or an image, or a symbol, or text, or book, or framework, or even a design object that exists in real life, and then finding a way to manipulate that and present it anew. This is slightly different from your question, but I’m thinking about what is legible and what kind of assumptions, fictions, and narratives are placed on these different objects as they exist in the real world. As they exist in their functional space, how can I make an intervention that allows us to pay attention to all the other apparatus under the performance of what it’s supposed to be doing. So, like a coloring book is meant to be this didactic tool, but in its very design and narrative, is all this other information, subtleties, other things happening below the surface. So, I’m interested in pointing to, or emphasizing all these things that are already present, that are hiding in plain sight.

SW: In your solo show at Contemporary Austin, what are some of the things that you’re trying to bring to the surface? 

SES: This show is particularly about various fictions that exist in these mechanisms of power. That’s kind of the most simplistic way that I could talk about it. There are these more abstract forms, and then there are these forms that are legible and very symbolic. There are these two sculptures that are in the shape of a cruciform, which is a very charged image, but it uses the same material as other objects in the show, which places the assumed knowledge of the symbol in conversation with every object using that material and then the exhibition space in totality. It links multiple systems of control, as one example. 

SW: What would you say are some of the ingredients necessary for work to be impactful for you? Do you have any idiosyncrasies in your process of creating? 

SES: One approach for me, and one thing that happens at the material level – there is this visual seduction that is present in my work. So, sometimes the objects are literally shining. There’s some kind of allure and that could be through surface treatment, etc.. There is something that draws you in aesthetically. It performs for you. It suggests that you’re going to have one experience with it, but then my desire, my hope, and the thing that I’m constantly trying to achieve is that, once you get closer, once you’re drawn into the object, by being in proximity to it, there is some shift in that experience where the visual pleasure is taken away from you, or there is a tension between what you realize you are looking at or how the work is unfolding. What it might be doing or what its subject matter might be, you are then left to try to reconcile that with the pleasure, the joy, or the surface level attraction to it in the first place. That’s a mechanism I’m constantly playing with and working with. 

SW: How would you say your personal archive informs the ideologies that sustain your practice? 

SES: I would say, you know, everything that I collect becomes my personal archive, and that’s sort of separate from if it’s about personal memorabilia from my life and my experience. The things that I’m drawn to are because I’m looking from my specific political lense. I am an observer of the world. I’m collecting information, researching, and finding ways to kind of metabolize that. My work is not necessarily about trying to articulate either my personal story or any other individual story. It’s about an impact, the impact on people at scale through a close analytical look at all these systems that are built into both our built environment, and the mechanisms that run our world. 

SW: Absolutely. Forward thinking a bit, what does the endorsement of the Suzanne Deal Booth and Flag Art Foundation ignite in you as you continue to get under the skin of being? 

SES: The prize is great, it’s an acknowledgment that artists are important and necessary figures in the world, as a whole, like even outside of me. I think one thing that is impactful is the material resource that the prize can enact. This allows me to think through the types of projects I want to make; how ambitious and experimental they can be. The other thing, and this is the thing that probably feels the most important to me about the prize, is it comes with the creation of a publication. An artwork is also a gesture which can create new conversations, new knowledge, new discussions, and new aesthetic interventions. That’s one kind of intellectual production. But then, a book documents that and can expand it. I think that’s something that’s exciting to me, and I feel it’s important to continue to expand the thought and the conversation around my practice, which can speak to the carceral but is not just rooted in this kind of one-dimensional idea of prison. So, I feel that the possibility and the resources to be able to create a document in tandem to the work and the practice is important, it has a kind of legacy that creates other types of future-oriented engagements. 

SW: Is there anything you find yourself returning to in your work? It could be a philosophy or a vision of something that has become a throughline?

SES: One thing that I always do return to is, maybe this question of, trying to find ways to articulate the invisible– and that’s through the art objects. That’s also through my own writing, writing about other artists, or trying to engage in ways to create new language. But I don’t mean language solely in the sense of the written text either. I think that’s something that definitely drives the practice. Sometimes that turns into work, and sometimes that just turns into tangents or research that maybe hasn’t been metabolized yet. 

SW: In your career have you had a “this is what I do it for” moment? Or are you still chasing that? 

SES: My answer to that probably is a lot more, maybe, minimal. My curiosity is the thing that drives me. It’s like a very quiet kind of propeller, you know? Making, pulling things apart, and trying to reconfigure them is just the only way that I know how to process information, how to look at things, how to turn it over, and try to find new answers in it. So, in that sense, even if my artwork wasn’t public, and I didn’t have this kind of identity as an artist or whatever that means– I think my curiosity would still be driving me to creatively try to produce things just for myself. There isn’t any kind of place that I’m trying to get to, no definitive milestone.

SW: It’s a bit insatiable, too. Kind of like, the journey’s the point. I feel that. Do you have any advice for a young emerging artist?

SES: Kind of similarly, being curious within yourself about why you’re doing it and what your impetus is. I’m thinking about younger artists in many different contexts, but, people go through school or art school, and you get all this outside information about what you should be doing or what you should achieve, which are all these different kinds of markers of external success, and I think that is some people’s goal, and there are different opportunities that come from that. But, being an artist or wanting to create and make this lifelong endeavor…if you don’t have a core understanding of what’s driving your impulse to think in this way, or want to produce things, or research in these materials means– then what you make can be shifted and swayed in so many different directions. I think the one thing that’s important is to continuously feel firm and re-root yourself in what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Especially when all this external chatter enters the mix.

SW: Do you find yourself having to defend your work a lot? 

SES: That’s a good question. I mean, I don’t feel the need to, right? I know what my work is. I know why I’m making the work. I know what drives me, but I think there is this interest in needing to negotiate when your work enters the public space. People want to make it about what they see or what feels important for their agenda, whatever that agenda might be at various times. I think I have become aware of that, and I’ve been interested in finding these different ways to make sure that there is a record of my intention. Like, I kind of talked about this book as something that’s important, and scholarship or the moment where my voice is present, that creates another record. Which counters these misinformed or mangled ideas about what the work is. So, yeah, there’s a way where we have to figure out how to contextualize the work and find opportunities to do that. 

SW: Yeah, I hear you. I’m in grad school and it’s all about defending your work. But another thing is canonizing yourself. Is that a byproduct of the work which is detached from you? Or is that something you actively must consider and make happen? 

SES: Well, I guess there’s nuance in language too, right? So, they’re thinking about the canon, and I think they’re many different definitions of that. There’s a kind of assumed canon in that we either are in conflict with, talking about its erasures, talking about its holes, or talking about what needs to be built out. But then also, I think we can be expansive in discussing and thinking about what art is and where it is coming from and think about that globally as well. I guess, I think more about while I’m here and while I’m making. I am interested in these topics, so I also want my research and my position to be present and so finding ways to kind of participate in scholarship and have scholarship being created about the practice. That’s something that will always exist and move forward with the work. Maybe that’s related to questions of the canon, legacy, or just creating these continuous narratives. Being in dialogue with the past and the future. So, that’s something that I’m more actively thinking about– how the work is being placed in relation to other types of art histories or theories. I think there are so many ways for that to happen, but it’s not necessarily my driving impulse.