Regen Projects announces FAIR GROUNDS, the gallery’s first solo exhibition with New York-based artist Sable Elyse Smith. For over a decade, Smith has parsed the materiality of ideology and its insidious infrastructures. Spanning work in video, sculpture, photography, works on paper, and text, she samples and combines distinct visual cultures and architectural forms to visualize the carceral state, scrutinizing how power and inequity solidify and delimit real lives. Featuring two powder-coated stainless-steel sculptures, new works from her Coloring Book series, a neon text sculpture, as well as several photographic works, the exhibition stages a dialogue of site, language, and shape to interrogate how distinctions and definitions of space dangerously weave violence, spectacle, and entertainment together.
“I make work that complicates our understanding of prison and how we name, identify, and locate violence,” wrote Smith, on the occasion of the Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet As It’s Kept. “At times I use the word Prison and mean the brick-and-mortar prison, yet that’s not the only prison,” Smith elaborated. “That’s not even the beginning of prison, or the end. Sometimes I talk about an actual prison and show an image, and people get fixated on that. But I’m saying ‘prison’ and meaning ‘the world.’ Meaning The Weather. And the weather is the machines in which we live, in which we loop…”
Smith regularly works across a variety of media and formats in pursuit of a comprehensive conceptual project. By invoking “The Weather,” Smith references the writings of scholar Christina Sharpe, who—in her 2016 book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes, “It is not the specifics of any one event or set of events that are endlessly repeatable and repeated, but the totality of the environments in which we struggle; the machines in which we live; what I am calling the weather.”
Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York. She received a BA from Oglethorpe University in Atlanta and an MFA in Design and Technology from Parsons School of Design, New York. Solo exhibitions include Ordinary Violence at the Queens Museum, Queens, NY (2017) and Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI (2019); and How We Tell Stories to Children, Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA (2018).
More information on the event can be found here.