Sable Elyse Smith

JTT is pleased to present Tithe, a solo exhibition featuring new work by Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles).

For over a decade, Smith has built a practice from tracing the threads of violence and power embedded within systems of belief, infrastructure, language, even intimacy. Spanning a broad range of media, Smith’s work samples and splices moments extracted from visual culture and the built environment, using strategies of repetition interwoven with gestures of poetic intervention to reveal implicit constructs of social control. As curator and scholar Horace Ballard has observed, Smith “dismantle[s] the power compositional forms have over language by making the all-too-comfortable elision between structures apparent and proving that language is as much an architecture and public monument as sculpted stone.” [1]

Language as architecture is central to Tithe. On view are a continuation of Smith’s “Coloring Book” series: blown up pages from activity books that Smith found on the street in Harlem. These pages, circulated under the guise of resources to children whose families are touched by incarceration, are revealed in Smith’s hands as a teaching tool to effectively normalize courtrooms and their proceedings as a childhood storybook. Printed here on black paper, the didactic images recede beneath Smith’s gestural mark making. Abstract forms and bold, otherworldly colors give way to Christian iconography in all its absurdity: Saint Francis communing with birds, halos and hellfire flares, figures standing on expanses of water. The exhibition’s title, Tithe, refers to the duty of submitting 10% of one’s income to the Church, a reminder of the economies that lie beneath the institutions that purport to “save.”

Throughout the exhibition, Smith draws parallels between visual motifs and practices deployed by both Christianity and the carceral system, and more broadly by church and state, to consider the substructures that perpetuate narratives of innocence and guilt. In a new sculpture, matte black prison stools multiply into Gravity, a towering crucifix bearing down on the viewer from the wall. What is gravity but an invisible force exerted continuously over a body, constant but rarely perceived? As in previous works where the stools have coalesced into giant jacks pieces or a ferris wheel, the conjoined stools emphasize the absurdity of carceral architecture, proposing against its normalization. Projected into space sideways, the stools collected to create Gravity actively defy it.

Tithe follows Smith’s presentations at the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale earlier this year, and coincides with the release of Smith’s first-ever monograph: And Blue In A Decade Where It Finally Means Sky, including texts by Horace Ballard, Johanna Burton, Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Christina Sharpe.

This is the first major monograph dedicated to the New York–based artist Sable Elyse Smith. Through her wide-ranging multimedia practice, Smith elucidates how the carceral state (read America) quietly inflicts violence and is constantly reinforced by the seemingly banal: from furniture found in prison visitation rooms, to pages from children’s coloring books. Included in this publication are works produced from 2015 to the present day to provide a comprehensive overview of Smith’s videos, sculptures, photography, texts and printed matter. Accompanying over 140 color images are texts by Horace Ballard (Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. Associate Curator of American Art at Harvard Art Museums), Johanna Burton (Executive Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles), Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (author of Friday Black), and Christina Sharpe (writer, professor and Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University).

1 - Horace Ballard, “demiurge / hors-texte / compositional historicism” in Sable Elyse Smith: And Blue In A Decade Where It Finally Means Sky (JTT and Regen Projects, 2022), 162.