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 class of her aesthetic, and the way in which 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 different identities for industrial or utilitarian objects that will in any other case sit in rubbish heaps; she’s included gadgets starting from vacuum hoses to used extension cords to sink drains into works that usually have the awkward or spidery grace of recent dance — unsurprisingly, the artist can be skilled 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 aid “Untitled (Heart)” (2025) resembles an organ beneath a skinny layer of pores and skin via 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 virtually painful on this context, like a protruding bone.
Celeste’s potential to create holistic sculptural varieties from disparate and disused components is a feat in itself; even essentially 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, residing physique and its mortality. Sure, histories of human use are embedded in a few of her supplies — as an example, the automobile headrests in “Head Rest” (2025), an anthropomorphic type that’s without delay comical and elegiac. However her attractive, tactile sculptures additionally evoke skins and bones and strain 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 via slashes in paler pink material stretched round a low, rounded rectangular type. The violence of its allusions to chop pores and skin is countered by the insulation’s cotton sweet coloration 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, chrome 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) via June 1. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
