Sable Elyse Smith Turns Prison Waiting-Room Chairs Into Children's Toys, Dismantling Institutional Violence One Object at a Time

A plastic chair from a prison waiting room, taken apart and reassembled into the pointed star shape of a child's game of jacks. It's the most direct piece in Sable Elyse Smith's solo exhibition "Clockwork" — twisting the most emotionally flat piece of institutional furniture into something a kid might crouch on the floor to play with. Another set of chairs from the same source is broken down into cross shapes and mounted on the wall, hovering somewhere between punishment, play, and religious symbol, with no clear answer offered.

"Clockwork" previously showed at The Contemporary Austin, and opens at The FLAG Art Foundation in New York on September 24, running through February 13, 2027. Smith is the recipient of the 2026 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, and the New York presentation amplifies the work's cinematic quality into an almost stage-like immersive space, spanning sculpture, video, neon, and photography.

Two video works form the axis of the exhibition. The 2021 piece "LAUGH TRACK, OR WHO'S THAT PEEKING IN MY WINDOW" is shown alongside "skin suit" (2026), a new work made for this prize. Both splice together found and original footage drawn from reality TV's familiar cop-chase sequences and body-cam recordings. The source material already carries a thriller's pacing, and Smith deliberately pushes viewers to shift between suspense, absurdity, and discomfort, forcing a direct confrontation with the biases already embedded in this kind of imagery.

The neon works, meanwhile, treat language itself as a battleground. Smith borrows the visual vocabulary of commercial signage and government notices, letting text that can replicate bias also be twisted into something else entirely — the exhibition doesn't specify which phrases exactly, but this thread shares the same logic as the sculpture and video: familiar, everyday objects, once rearranged within the context of surveillance and incarceration, can never be read the same way again.

Ticket information was not provided in the source materials.