KIAH CELESTE

The Right Side Down

January 15th - February 13th 2022

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present The Right Side Down, the first New York solo exhibition by multi dimensional artist Kiah Celeste, comprised of new sculptures and installation. Her ever developing industrious practice, reliant on recycling and manipulating found objects and materials nods to concepts and concerns of environmental sustainability. This nomadic performance composed of equal parts innovation, concept, grit, and grace, synchronized into the gallery’s atypical arrangement, emits a cry and simultaneous vision into our collective uncertain future.  

The Right Side Down, itself a word play that knocks over the notion of our standard of living, lends to Celeste’s arrangement of objects and to her viewpoint of life.  Stemming from her education as a photography major, her work still seems reliant on that decisive moment; it is something that is captured in the mind, it is made with patience, it is made with time, and it is made with what life has to offer, not the other way around.  This contemptuous reimagining of “things”, objects that we often pass by without acknowledgement, or perhaps even scorn; Celeste brings out of the dirt, both figuratively and literally and unifies into an undefinable poetry.  

At first glance, as our mind is trained, the works bring to mind specific adjectives or motions, fall, split, fold, bend, etc; reminiscent of Richard Serra’s famous "Verb List" (1967–68),  what he described as a series of “actions to relate to oneself, material, place, and process.”  These words are things we know, and can place into compartments in our minds, but we get lost as we try to utilize these feckless gizmos.  This is where Celeste’s work begins to twist our whole conception of our relation to the world, the toddler like tinkering is itself a reference to our own collective loss in the face of capitalism.  A nod to our once innocence, the way that the artist explores objects and wields them is a wonder, a fascination that we often lose in our earliest years.  

In works like Hugs and Crimson Press, two sets of materials squeeze each other into bliss, their hardness somehow softened by the artist’s delicate balancing and sense of space.  While gravity holds those two down, A Thread In Water, consisting of two concrete blocks who grip a fabric wrapped twisting pipe, feels as if at any minute it might float away.  Eva Hesse once said, "It is something, it is nothing.”, Celeste’s world is a place where everything fits, but nothing works. This ambiguity is pointedly displayed in the immensely technical yet ever simple site specific Between The Ears, where a colored tube seems to live forever embedded inside the gallery’s wall.  

Viewers, upon meeting Celeste’s cunning curios perchance may snarl or snicker at the absurdity of these works, a conditioned value system that disallows this kind of cavorting; the irony is they, the artworks, are doing the exact same.  Stamped in the work Tweedledee and Tweedledum, a work consisting of two chairs inverted and held together by foam rollers, and who’s namesake derives from twins in Lewis Carroll’s “Through The Looking Glass”, forces us to question ourselves, face the mirror, and to say, the joke is on us.  With the works produced amongst a global pandemic, compounded by the exposition of our shared dilemma of constant tragedy, Celeste's efforts prove that there is evolution in living in uncertainty and the unknown.  They verify that change is the only constant, they serve to reflect upon us that our time, our foundation is fragile, and at any moment can all fall apart.