![]() ![]() You can respond to things on a bodily, haptic level. SES: Emotion is the knowledge that we all have access to. In this photo essay, Naima Green accompanies the artist on her morning spiritual to Kenneth Hahn Park and back to the studio.ĪNC: You mentioned in other interviews how you’re less interested in representing prison as it is and more driven by affect, or how it feels to be in these spaces. With work that spans performance and video but remains rooted in photography, Lennon functions as part conductor, part witness. Image The pleasures of performance with artist Lacey Lennon That’s the kind of material I’m pulling from to make the work. Different kinds of jails or prisons have different aesthetics, different colors, different kinds of rules. Then there’s all the material references. and having to drive to these other locations through these vast desert landscapes. That’s the impetus of my practice - those experiences and thinking about those architectures and those landscapes, like leaving L.A. My first experiences of police and prisons were in California - those are most of the prisons that I’ve actually been in and visited. Also, a lot of my work is thinking about the carceral space more broadly, so not just prisons. There’s something about the rhythm, the imagery and the aesthetic that sonically exists in L.A., West Coast, gangsta rap - that aesthetic drives everything that I do.ĪNC: Sampling, remixing. I used to make music when I was in high school, and for a couple years out of high school. Specifically, rap music, and definitely a lot of West Coast rap music. Music is a big influence in my work, even if it isn’t obvious on the surface. Sable Elyse Smith: There’s a lot of indirect references to how L.A. How did this city shape you as an artist and thinker? In Smith’s hands, images of justice and safety warp into a carnival of faceless judges and rigged games.Īllison Noelle Conner: Most people associate you with New York, but you were born and raised in Los Angeles. Though the original pages exude a sincere trust in the court (“People Have to See The Judge When They Break the Law,” the text in one painting reads), Smith adds her own oblique commentary, using oil pastels to turn figures into clowns and wizards. Like a toss of the jacks into the air, incarceration feels like a game of violent chance, where the rules are driven by larger histories of racial capitalism.Įlsewhere, paintings like “Coloring Book 139” recast the pages of a children’s activity book - which Smith found years ago while taking a walk in her Harlem neighborhood - into cutting satiric scenes that emphasize the absurdity of incarceration. At Regen Projects, Smith reimagines the visiting-room stools of prisons as playground toys. ![]() Her work unpacks the psychic toll of navigating these environments daily. The artist, who has now lived in New York for more than a decade, was born and raised in Los Angeles, and her work draws from her firsthand experience interfacing with the prison system in Southern California, where her father was incarcerated for 19 years. artist Delfin Finley explores the gray areas of living, where joy and pain collide.Īcross her videos, sculptures, photographs, works on paper and texts, Smith returns to how society is shaped by carceral logic. Image ‘I wanted to give my family, my community something to see’ For her, prison isn’t a location but a state of being. Smith expands on this idea and positions the carceral system as a similar kind of atmosphere. The show is partly inspired by the writings of scholar Christina Sharpe, who, in her book “In the Wake: Blackness and Being,” characterizes anti-Blackness as an atmosphere, or “weather,” that coats everything in the U.S. Furniture is transformed into large-scale jack-like objects and colors evoke the flash of police spotlights. Drawing on the sights and sounds and language of the fair, she collapses the carnival and the prison, revealing how deeply intertwined punishment is with entertainment and spectacle. In her first solo exhibition at Regen Projects, “FAIR GROUNDS,” Smith expands upon “A Clockwork,” first shown in the 2022 Whitney Biennial. Items that are usually bolted to the floor, restricting a person’s movement, become kinetic. But the octagons and poles forming this sculpture were sourced from aluminum tables and seats used in prison visiting rooms. The black metal structure resembles a rotating Ferris wheel, its motion slow and seemingly unending. At first glance, Sable Elyse Smith’s “A Clockwork” (2021) looks like it was transported from an amusement park. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |