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Men Who Swallow Themselves in Mirrors

Sable Elyse Smith

2017 00:08:32 United StatesEnglishColorStereo16:9Video
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Description

"In this eight-minute video work, we are given nonnarrative footage sutured together to form a fragmented, hallucinatory sensation. Storefronts zoom by as captured in grainy footage out of the passenger seat of a car, two unseen men undergo tactical training that involves shooting ice with handguns, and kaleidoscopic images of cops swirl in red and blue hues. The entire work migrates between a Black conceptualist dérive and an exposé on the mundane ways that violence meets the affective realms of everyday Black life."

- Sampada Aranke, Everyday Exposures in Sable Elyse Smith’s Ordinary Violence

About Sable Elyse Smith

Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator based in New York. Using video, sculpture, photography, and text, she points to the carceral, the personal, the political, and the quotidian to speak about a violence that is largely unseen, and potentially imperceptible. Her work has been featured at MoMA Ps1, New Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, New York; ICA Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA; and MIT List Visual Arts Centers, Cambridge, MA amongst others. She has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters.