Sable Elyse Smith
LANDSCAPES & PLAYGROUNDS

ISBN 978-0-9985006-4-5
August 2017, English, 7 x 10 in, 62 pages, risograph, color, b/w, softcover
Edition of 115
Design: Sming Sming Books

Sable Elyse Smith's LANDSCAPES & PLAYGROUNDS trains its attention on the significance on two sites of fantasy: the landscape and the playground. Smith considers these sites as they relate specifically to prison environments, where landscape murals typically adorn visiting room walls, vast swaths of land often serve as a background to the campuses, and the contentious interior spaces give rise to complex emotional landscapes for those imbricated in the system. Using both essayistic and diaristic lenses, the book turns an intimate eye on the interior, the body, and the layered relationship between a father and daughter.

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her practice considers memory and trauma while enacting an undoing of language. She works from the archive of her own body creating new syntax for knowing and not knowing, thereby marking the difference between witnessing and watching. To see is unbearable. She has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, Eyebeam, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. Her work has also been screened at Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries, London, Artist Television Access, San Francisco, and MoMA Ps1, New York. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Selfish, Studio Magazine and with Recess Art’s Critical Writing Fellowship. She is currently working on her first book. Smith has received grants & fellowships from Creative Capital, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She is currently part-time faculty at Parsons The New School for Design and will be a visiting Faculty at Virginia Commonwealth University this Fall in the Sculpture and Extended Media department.

Suggested Reading/Listening:

"Firsthand at Arm’s Length" by Diana Hamilton
June 2018 in Art in America

Artist Talk: Sable Elyse Smith
March 2018 at Aperture Gallery, New York

"Prison Nation," with essay by Jessica Lynne
Spring 2018 in Aperture