Kiah Celeste’s To Be Held for a Lengthy Time is an understated however profound portrait of transformation. For the previous a number of years, the Louisville-based artist has been creating sculptures from discovered objects. What separates her artwork from that of most artists working on this vein is the magnificence of her aesthetic, and the best way she coaxes life from the objects with out recourse to sentimentality.
Celeste focuses much less on the idea of salvaging discarded issues than on discovering various identities for industrial or utilitarian objects that will in any other case sit in rubbish heaps; she’s integrated gadgets starting from vacuum hoses to used extension cords to sink drains into works that always have the awkward or spidery grace of contemporary dance — unsurprisingly, the artist can be educated as a dancer.
For her second present at Swivel, Celeste introduces framed wall reliefs to her repertoire of summary sculptures. In “Standing Sideways” (2025), the navy blue material floor is pushed outward from the within by the soles of geta sandals. The result’s an uncanny and even unsettling disruption of a minimalist monochrome.
Set up view of Kiah Celeste: To Be Held for a Lengthy Time at Swivel Gallery
An analogous sense of presence is obvious all through the present. In “Holy Mug” (2025), the artist threads 36 white mugs alongside a metal pipe by their handles, creating the looks of vertebrae. Worn, bone-like heads of bowling pins positioned within the mugs’ mouths intensify the natural high quality of the piece. Likewise, a peach-toned bike seat pressed in opposition to the within of a spandex floor within the wood-framed reduction “Untitled (Heart)” (2025) resembles an organ beneath a skinny layer of pores and skin by Celeste’s sleight of hand. A porcelain cupboard or closet knob sitting atop the bike seat on the outside of the stretched material feels uncovered and nearly painful on this context, like a protruding bone.
Celeste’s means to create holistic sculptural kinds from disparate and disused components is a feat in itself; even probably the most expert post-minimalist sculptors have a tough time making CDs and DVDs transcend their low-cost, mass-produced materiality, as she does with the round, luminescent “Ouroboros” (2025). Extra considerably, although, this exhibition emphasizes how deeply the artist’s largely artificial composites dig into the natural, dwelling physique and its mortality. Sure, histories of human use are embedded in a few of her supplies — as an example, the automotive headrests in “Head Rest” (2025), an anthropomorphic kind that’s without delay comical and elegiac. However her beautiful, tactile sculptures additionally evoke skins and bones and stress factors, in order that they’re not simply symbolic of human lives, however reflections of embodiment in all of its fragility and resilience.
In “Antebellum Pink” (2024), probably my favourite work within the present, pink fiberglass insulation peeks by slashes in paler pink material stretched round a low, rounded rectangular kind. The violence of its allusions to chop pores and skin is countered by the insulation’s cotton sweet shade and fluff. Whereas this ambivalence retains Celeste’s artwork from stagnating, it’s the imperfections and scars that preserve it alive.
Set up view of Kiah Celeste: To Be Held for a Lengthy Time at Swivel Gallery. Wall: “Untitled (Heart)” (2025), spandex, bike seat, porcelain knob, poplar body; foreground: “Antebellum Pink” (2024), spandex, fiberglass insulation, plywood.
Kiah Celeste, “Cord” (2025), spandex, extension wire, stainless-steel, poplar body
Kiah Celeste, “Ouroboros” (2025), CDs, DVDs, metal
Kiah Celeste: To Be Held for a Lengthy Time continues at Swivel Gallery (555 Greenwich Avenue, Hudson Sq., Manhattan) by June 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
