The FLAG Art Foundation is pleased to announce Clockwork, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent work by Sable Elyse Smith (2016 Creative Capital Awardee), the 2026 recipient of the Suzanne Deal Booth / FLAG Art Foundation Prize, on view from September 24, 2026-February 13, 2027. Following its presentation at The Contemporary Austin, FLAG reframes Clockwork by expanding its more cinematic elements into an immersive stage set environment, where video becomes an immediate means of visualizing unseen, ordinary violence. Including sculpture, video, neon, and photography, Clockwork interrogates the fundamental systems of power that define contemporary society, as well as their cultural and psychological impacts. Through formal strategies such as seriality and repetition, disorientation, and appropriation, Smith illustrates how systems of power not only overlap, but how they intertwine and mutually reinforce one another.

Clockwork features two video installations that signal moments of transition and pause within the exhibition. By layering found and original footage in LAUGH TRACK, OR WHO’S THAT PEEKING IN MY WINDOW, 2021, and skin suit, 2026—created specifically for the Prize—Smith collages conflicting moments of suspense, humor, poetry, frustration, and pathos to expose personal and institutional biases. Both videos take their cues from harried police chase/bodycam footage popularized by reality shows such as Cops (1989-2020), whose cultural impact would and continues to shape televised entertainment in the U.S.

Evoking the mechanical precision of the systems from which they derive, Smith’s sculptures within the exhibition transform prison furniture in ways that show how repetition, doubling, and layering can complicate, if not entirely obscure, the original meaning of their materials. In BARRICADE, 2023, BARRIER, 2023, and Riot III, 2022, Smith repurposes the metal stools that populate prison waiting rooms into star-shaped forms reminiscent of Jacks, the childhood game; in Gravity, 2022, and Vanilla Wafer, 2023, those same stools project from the gallery walls to create unambiguously cruciform shapes—each offering different possible interpretation of systems of reward and punishment.