AUSTIN — Sable Elyse Smith’s work is shaped by a sustained examination of the United States carceral system. At the Contemporary Austin, Clockwork — the culmination of her 2026 Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize — is made up primarily of paintings that appropriate prison coloring books for visiting children on the first floor, alongside large-scale sculptures and installations on the second.
Read as a complete body, Smith’s practice borrows from Minimalism’s repetition and seriality to present a metaphor for structural injustice. In doing so, it draws attention to the patterned, almost rhythmic nature of technological and administrative forms of tyranny.
The coloring books Smith transforms were originally designed to help children emotionally process the violence of incarceration. In her hands, the images and texts appear to liquefy, as though they are dissolving the very foundations of the institutions they depict. The result is both unsettling and incisive, turning an assigned exercise into a critique of power.
Two works use the same page layout: a courthouse waiting room filled with families and an assortment of creatures, paired with the absurd prompt, “What 10 things don’t belong in this picture?” In one version, Smith fills in a select number of human figures with solid blue, converting them into police officers as symbols of omnipotent institutional authority. In the other, x’s and o’s are placed across figures and faces, underscoring the oppressive atmosphere of such spaces.
Smith effectively redirects the ludicrous question of belonging into a broader challenge to recurring structures of power. Her work reframes the logic of the coloring book as a site where the violence of institutions can be seen, named, and resisted.
