Naima Green – Tell me more about your piece in the Whitney, and why a Ferris wheel, and what your fascination with carnivals is.
Sable-Elyse Smith – So the piece for the Whitney is a work in a series of sculptures that are basically objects built from one-to-one replicas of prison visiting room tables and chairs. The chair-table configuration is [also] a building block to make potentially exponential things,because they exponentially exist, and are fabricated, and being produced, probably as we speak. Because there's a billion-dollar industry based off of them. People say the word prison, and you think of one specific kind of image and one thing. But I'm more interested in, if you hear the word prison, then you'll maybe think, “Okay, how am I conditioned to walk down the street?” Or, “How do I think about certain neighborhoods?” Or, ‘How do I think about the way that I'm allowed to, move through certain spaces?" Because it has a direct linkage or impact into what our society [is], or what the network of things that create a carceral existence in, which is what the U.S. is.
I wanted to focus a different type of attention on violence and entertainment, and where the edges of that is, or where the boundaries of those things are, and also how entertainment creates a condition. It creates, and it sort of implants the image, and the idea, that the prison has to exist. Or a criminal does exist, and this is what a criminal looks like. And therefore, if there's [the] criminal, then we need prison.
Those things mutually reinforce each other. And also, our society’s lust and thirst for violence and where that could be performed, and where it can't be performed, and where it's permissible, and the edge of where it can't exist, based on morality. All these constructions that our world and society is built on, and then governed by, and how all these things trickle into those systems. But what are interesting examples that are legible to people about that? I start to think about the carnival space.
And because it has a context, it has a frame drawn around it. And that frame is, this is a space of fun, amusement, pleasure, entertainment. You pay to go here. And what happens is you are entertained and you experience pleasure. And that is fine. Back in the day, pay your quarter, and then stand behind a little fence and watch people deemed ‘freaks.’ People who are othered in various ways just be on display, dance, entertain, or engage in real physical violence.
And so, a carnival is a space to be able to tease out that example with a bit more legibility, and recognizability, and then I can go in and do all kinds of fucked-up shit with that.
Because it's also not like, "Oh, I'm making a grotesque, or a disturbing, image." I'm putting on display something that is real; something that it is, obviously, a symbol, or metaphor, or kind of a footnote of a larger system. I think when people sort of encounter these objects, or these things that are put in the world, there’s this seduction, there's this interest in like, "Oh, it's beautiful." But then, there is a confrontation with that subject matter. And I think that is the thing that is disturbing. And then, that is the thing – for what it's saying and what it's talking about is disturbing, but it also is real life. It is a caricature or an exaggeration of the U.S. and the world that we live in, and the world that I move around in as a Black person. But there is, I think, there is a confrontation, an individual confrontation, with the viewer. If they have a different subject position than a person who is entangled or oppressed by all of these kinds of systems and operations. And their desire to just want to have visual pleasure and have a kind of entertainment also. Right?
And so depending on the viewer's positionality to any one of these things, there are moments where certain viewers do have to wrestle with that kind of confrontation. That could be silent and not visible at all. Some people look at a work, and once they realize what it's about, they have to decide to continue to engage. Or they walk away, because they don't want to engage with that subject matter. Or they refuse to talk about that subject matter. And I think when those things come out, whether that ever is visible in the exhibition or not, that's what's interesting. And that's what's important to me. And sometimes I'm able to witness that, or that information comes back to me. But regardless, it's there. It's an energy, it lingers in the room. And some people have to leave with it, and it leaves the room with them, too.