HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday.
Today’s show: “Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence” is on view at the Queens Museum in New York through Sunday, February 18. The solo exhibition presents work that “continues [Smith’s] ongoing exploration of the trauma and emotional violence affected on incarcerated individuals and their loved ones,” drawing on “her own experiences of visiting her father in prisons for the past 19 years,” according to a press release.
Below, an artist’s statement accompanying the exhibition:
The images are made so that I can see the people in them, so that I can see me.
The self is contextual; contingent upon geography, system, relationship, memory, knowing . . .
And violence can be quotidian, like the landscape of prison shaping itself around my body. The images are made so that I can see me. I am haunted by Trauma. We are woven into this kaleidoscopic memoir by our desires to consume pain, to blur fact and fiction, to escape
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Installation view of "Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence," 2017, at Queens Museum, New York.
HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Installation view of "Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence," 2017, at Queens Museum, New York.
HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Sable Elyse Smith, Landscape I, 2017, neon, installation view.
HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Installation view of "Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence," 2017, at Queens Museum, New York.
HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Installation view of "Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence," 2017, at Queens Museum, New York.
HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Installation view of "Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence," 2017, at Queens Museum, New York.
HAI ZHANG/COURTESY THE ARTIST AND QUEENS MUSEUM
Sable Elyse Smith, Untitled, 2017, acrylic.
COURTESY THE ARTIST
Sable Elyse Smith, 7665 Days, 2017, digital C-print, suede mat, artist frame.
COURTESY THE ARTIST
Sable Elyse Smith, How We Tell Stories to Children (still), 2015, single-channel video.
COURTESY THE ARTIST