Vivian Springford & Kiah Celeste

"Soft Edges”

Swivel Gallery is pleased to present Soft Edges, a two-person exhibition bringing into dialogue the work of Vivian Springford and Kiah Celeste. Across generations and materials, both artists pursue the shared inquiry of how energy moves through matter, and how balance, whether cosmic or domestic, is achieved, disturbed, and restored.

February 28th - March 28th, 2026

555 Greenwich Street, New York City

At the heart of this exhibition is Springford’s lifelong engagement with Taoist philosophy. Long regarded as an abstractionist, Springford is now understood as a painter of nature’s hidden order. Her celebrated canvases, once mistaken for purely formal exercises, have now been later revealed as aerial meditations, circles of mineral color expanding outward like breath itself. In Taoist thought, water is the supreme metaphor: yielding yet powerful, reflective yet transformative. Springford’s concentric pours embody this principle. Color gathers, releases, and returns. Matter becomes motion; motion becomes light. Across five decades, Springford painted not the landscape itself, but the current of energy that animates it. Volcanic force becomes renewal; immersion becomes dissolution of the boundary between self and environment. Gesture becomes pool, pool becomes eruption, eruption dissolves into cosmos, a continuum of transformation rooted in balance between form and void.

If Springford traces invisible currents through pigment, Kiah Celeste stages those tensions in physical space. Celeste’s sculptural works, leaning, stacked, inverted, suspended, are built from found objects and everyday materials, industrial remnants of previous eras. Extracted from both urban and natural systems, these materials carry mnemonic weight, traces of touch, habitation, and abandonment. Celeste restores balance not by concealing instability, but by exposing it. Gravity, friction, and resistance become collaborators. Works appear perpetually on the verge of collapse, yet hold in delicate equilibrium. What were once discarded or feckless fragments are granted renewed function, an opportunity to fit and to belong again. In this way, Celeste’s practice echoes Taoist principles as materially as Springford’s does chromatically. Harmony is not fixed perfection but the dynamic negotiation of opposing forces.

Where Springford looks down from the aerial perspective, painting circulation, rhythm, and unseen flow; Celeste works at the scale of the body. Her sculptures ask viewers to confront precarity as a shared condition, forcing a confrontation with reflection and absurdity; tenderness within tension. The works oscillate between humor and gravity, innocence and loss, echoing our collective instability in an age of ecological and economic imbalance. Both artists ultimately collapse the division between human and environment. Springford dissolves the self into pool, ocean, and cosmos. Celeste entwines domestic relics with industrial debris, staging encounters between nature and the built world. Each proposes that balance is never static; it is achieved through relationship.

Soft Edges invites viewers to consider two complementary modes of attunement: one that follows the flow of qi through pigment and void, and one that tests the weight of the world through matter and touch. In Springford’s work, we contemplate energy. In Celeste’s, we witness its negotiation. Together, they form a meditation on holding and being held, on how things fall apart, and how they might, for a moment longer, remain suspended.