Kiah Celeste

To Be Held For A Long Time

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Kiah Celeste’s second solo exhibition with the gallery, “To Be Held For A Long Time”, featuring an array of new floor and wall sculptures, expanding on the artists intuitive utilization of objects and everyday materials to create concoctions that are at once familiar, and contrarily foreign and feckless. Her new body of work relies on a deep connection between humans and the environment, as well as the subtle boundaries and transitions between them.

May 6th - June 1st, 2025

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

Kiah Celeste’s work ingeniously manipulates the remnants of both urban and natural landscapes, contemplating a maker’s capacity to deploy creative and inventive means to re-imagine their surroundings. While the constituents of each piece are extracted from natural and man-made systems, Celeste imagines new narratives that restore balance to the objects—an opportunity for them to fit in and function once again. Leaning, stacking, or hanging, her works echo the strategies of postminimalism in their harnessing of gravity, tension, friction, and resistance. She explores basic concepts in physics by arranging relationships between different types of matter, oftentimes things that were never meant for each other but seamlessly intertwine. These sentiments can be seen as a symbolic gesture for the complexity of our own lives and relationships, posing metaphorical questions around the principles of balance and precarity in individual and collective contexts. Celeste channels different epochs, whilst acknowledging the instrumentality of objects and exploring the sometimes tender, sometimes fraught relationship between people and people, and likewise things and people. 

Incorporating primarily man-made materials into her pieces, from synthetic amalgamations of discarded wares and industrial waste, to coffee mugs, head rests, bowling balls and the like, evoking memories of space once inhabited by humans or everyday litter found in the bustling city streets. It can be noted of course that these objects are things that serve as everyday onlookers that are in tandem observing our lives, and the lives of ones that have come before us. They hold within them a mnemonic sensibility that reminds us of love, death, home, and our personal journeys, captivating us and promising space; having a presence and yet going mostly unnoticed. It is an examination of our lives and their accrual, whether that be within the body or within our domestic abodes, thus twisting our entire conception of our relation to the world, as Celeste tinkers away with the twinkling eye of a young child, discovering the world and it’s wonders on the one hand, while on the other facing our collective loss in the face of capitalism and perhaps just wishing once more, to be held a long time.