Sable Elyse Smith & Camel Collective (Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats)
Sable Elyse Smith
Sable Elyse Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator 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 a new syntax for knowing and not knowing, thereby marking the difference between witnessing and watching. To see is unbearable. She has performed at the New Museum, Eyebeam, Queens Museum, NY; and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. She is currently a selected participant in the New Museums Seminars: (Temporary) Collection of Ideas, on the thematic PERSONA. Her work has been published in Radical Teacher, Studio Magazine and No Tofu Magazine and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received grants & fellowships from 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.
Camel Collective
Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats have worked as Camel Collective since 2005. They draw on narrative theater and dramaturgy, combining them with research into marginal histories, critical pedagogy, and entertainment. These cross-disciplinary works involve collaboration from among a variety of participants. The collective writes theatricalized scenarios into exhibitions for the productive frictions generated when genres cross—discourse becomes a chorus, documents become a strike, a political impasse becomes an occasion for painting. Their projects are largely informed by the works and methods of Bertolt Brecht and the social portraiture of the Weimar avant-garde. Camel’s exhibitions and performances have been presented at Casa del Lago, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros in Mexico City; the Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan Puerto, Puerto Rico; Overgaden Institut for Samtidskunst and Aarhus Museum, in Denmark; and Artist’s Space, Art in General, Exit Art, and MassMoCA, in the US.