Pivot III

2020 - Sculpture (Sculpture)

142.24 x 142.24 x 142.24 cm

Sable Elyse Smith

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Sable Elyse Smith’s Pivot III resembles playground equipment uselessly reconfigured. The stainless-steel asterisks, assembled from prison visitation-room seating, are painted 2K black and blue: colors evoking the US criminal justice system, its racist enforcement, and the heavy-duty finish of finance capitalism with which the culture industry is enmeshed. The work consists of six long rods, affixed via plate to each of the faces of a central cube, from which they radiate in perfect symmetry. Each rod terminates in a circular disk, riveted in four places. They rest on the thin outer edges of the disks, like toy jacks tossed in the air by a giant and left on the floor where they fell. At the same time, they extend the logic of carceral design. In her 2019 essay on Smith, “Universal Gravitation,” Hannah Black interprets the typically knee-high design of tables and chairs for prison visiting rooms (in an attempt to fight against the exchange of contraband beneath them) as “the state protecting itself against the exchange of intimacy.”’ In its rigid, abstract symmetry, the sculpture registers less as an object than as a diagrama or technical apparatus: like an illustration of molecular geometry or a satellite stuck orbiting the world on a terminal trajectory.

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Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York and Richmond, Virginia. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to reveal largely unseen and potentially imperceptible violence. She has, in particular, explored the trauma and emotional violence affected on incarcerated individuals and their loved ones. Mining her own experiences of visiting her father in prisons for the past 19 years, Smith often visualizes ways in which an impersonal bureaucratic system of incarceration affects the bodies and minds of people bound to it in various ways.

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Colors:

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• capitalism.n.01
• furniture.n.01
• design.n.01
• imprisonment.n.01
• object.n.01