NADA Miami 2021

Ryan Cosbert, Vyczie Dorado, and Kiah Celeste Presentation

December 1st - December 4th, 2021

Swivel Gallery is proud to participate at this year's NADA Miami with a presentation featuring large scale paintings by Ryan Cosbert, sculptures by Kiah Celeste, and mixed media works on paper by Vyczie Dorado. Each of these artists are pushing the boundaries of their mediums; and doing so with force, intention, innovation, and individualism. The three dynamic women share in common a demand for a future that is their own, while simultaneously acknowledging, ingesting, and reshaping a past that is permeated with conditioning. Ryan Cosbert’s two massive canvases, “Currency” and “Ocean” ignite the back walls of the booth, her blazing strokes and technique mirror the titles, as their energies push and pull us into a wave of emotions that wash over the viewer. This unteachable effect stems from Cosbert’s ability to channel her personal and collective histories and transcend them into a higher consciousness. While Cosbert’s paintings seem to charge at us, Kiah Celeste’s sculptures tenuously hang in the balance.

Her industrious practice, reliant on recycling and manipulating found objects and materials nods to concepts and concerns of environmental sustainability. Her weighty, masterful creations eerily float in place, as exemplified in Set and When The Window Cracked II, where the materials are constantly interdependent on each other to exist. In My Arms About You, Celeste weaves vinyl sewn sandbags intermingled with steel pipes, in an embracing composition. Despite their stoic positions, Kiah Celeste’s considerate creations mimic our own personal situations, and likewise the world at large; they serve to reflect upon us that our time, our foundation is fragile, and at any moment can all fall apart.

Eerily flanking the booth are Vyczie Dorado’s meticulous mixed media works on paper. Their at first playful sensibility, featuring entrancing androgynous creatures who live in a world that only a partial reality; slowly becomes skewed as the viewer notices in the painstaking renderings minute details which leave us discombobulated. This head scratch moment is Dorado’s magic, where a mass of mark making accumulates into a dreamlike moment. In Stomach Flora', a figure is suspended in a graphite void, its face hidden by a resinous flower growing out of its belly button. Here, Dorado explicitly comments on her practice’s investigation into the immunocompromised body and hereditary heirlooms; noted by the tiny den in the background that confirms the notion we are generationally far from home. The imaginary world of the artist, one which is never complete but rife with setbacks becomes clearer in the work, A Bundle Of Sticks (aka a fag). The alien-like figure resting in a field of green, its glum expression hinting at its loneliness comments on questions of identity, gender, and the navigation of a world which is still rarely accepting of entities outside of society's expectation. The being buoyantly lays there, as if it's waiting to leave our world, but is held in place by resin casted weights that cling to the drawing and perhaps say themselves, wait. While all three women in the booth respectively command their own practices, their correspondence with each other strong-handedly says, this is our world, and our time now, forevermore.