The Contemporary Austin stages a defining survey of the artist’s incisive interrogation of carceral and cultural structures.
Sable Elyse Smith, Colouring Book 126, 2023. Screen printing ink, oil pastel, and oil stick on paper. 60 x 50 inches. Image courtesy The Contemporary Austin. Photograph by Alex Boeschenstein
In March 2026, The Contemporary Austin opens ‘Clockwork’, a major solo exhibition by Sable Elyse Smith, positioning the New York-based artist at a critical juncture in her practice. Awarded the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, Smith’s presentation marks both her first solo exhibition in Texas and her most expansive institutional project to date, later travelling to New York.
Framed as a five-year survey, ‘Clockwork’ resists the neatness of retrospective form. Instead, it unfolds as a layered encounter with Smith’s evolving language across sculpture, video, text and image. Her work persistently probes the architectures of power that organise everyday life, tracing how these systems operate not only as visible infrastructures but as psychological conditions embedded in culture.
At the centre of the exhibition is ‘A Clockwork’ (2021), a monumental kinetic sculpture first shown in the Whitney Biennial. Constructed from prison waiting room furniture and configured as a slowly rotating Ferris wheel, the work stages a disquieting convergence of spectacle and the carceral state. Its circular motion becomes both metaphor and mechanism, evoking repetition, containment and the relentless circulation of institutional violence.
Elsewhere, Smith’s neon works sharpen her longstanding engagement with language, transforming text into luminous structures that echo commercial signage and institutional authority. These are accompanied by selections from her Colouring Book series, in which appropriated children’s imagery is reworked to expose the ideological entanglements between education and justice. Across video installations that draw on the visual grammar of televised police chases, Smith reveals how popular media naturalise surveillance and control.
What distinguishes ‘Clockwork’ is its insistence on simultaneity. Distinct bodies of work are brought into dialogue for the first time, foregrounding the artist’s iterative approach and her capacity to shift scale and register without losing conceptual precision. Through strategies of repetition, disorientation and appropriation, Smith renders visible the often imperceptible systems that structure experience.
In ‘Clockwork’, systems are neither abstract nor distant. They are intimate, cyclical and inescapably present, operating with a quiet precision that the artist compels us to confront.
