Sable Elyse Smith

Pivot III

Sable Elyse Smith’s Pivot III resembles playground equipment uselessly reconfigured. The stainless-steel asterisks, assembled from prison visitation-room seating, are painted 2K black and blue: colors evoking the US criminal justice system, its racist enforcement, and the heavy-duty finish of finance capitalism with which the culture industry is enmeshed.

The work consists of six long rods, affixed via plate to each of the faces of a central cube, from which they  radiate in perfect symmetry. Each rod terminates in a circular disk, riveted in four places. They rest on the thin outer edges of the disks, like toy jacks tossed in the air by a giant and left on the floor where they fell. At the same time, they extend the logic of carceral design. In her 2019 essay on Smith, “Universal Gravitation,” Hannah Black interprets the typically knee-high design of tables and chairs for prison visiting rooms (in an attempt to fight  against the exchange of contraband beneath them) as “the state protecting itself against the exchange of intimacy.”’ In its rigid, abstract symmetry, the sculpture registers less as an object than as a diagrama or technical apparatus: like an illustration of molecular geometry or a satellite stuck orbiting the world on a terminal trajectory.