![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Pending-Mobile-1.jpg?w=400\")
<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tCeleste, a New York native, has been \u201cforaging\u201d for materials ever since. She has an incredible knack for making everyday objects feel foreign and familiar at the same time. Ouroboros<\/em> (2025), for instance, is a seductive string of old CDs. Works in her \u201cDream of Pearl\u201d (2023)series look like pearls on pillows\u2014a sort of reverse princess-and-the-pea situation\u2014but are made of acrylic skylight domes and bowling balls that, in her hands, appear weightless.\u00a0<\/p>\n \n\tI asked Celeste if she has rules for herself, and she told me they are loose: \u201cI don\u2019t like to do too much to an object,\u201d she explained, \u201cbut I also don\u2019t want it to be a readymade.\u201d Also: \u201cI try not to use anything new.\u201d This is partly an environmentalist position\u2014less a solution to the piles of trash filling our planet than an inspiring ethos of resourcefulness, a reminder that there is beauty to be found even in refuse. Besides, used objects \u201cmake sense financially,\u201d she added. They also \u201chave a history, have character.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIt\u2019s wild how, once I\u2019m able to name the objects I\u2019m seeing, my sense of her sculptures shift starkly: The effortlessly floating pearl gives way to a heavy but impressively engineered bowling ball. But if Celeste\u2019s abstractions have a subject, it is tension\u2014between the abstract and nameable components, but also between classes and movements. She balances the elegant restraint of Minimalism with the ordinary accessibility of readymades and Pop. Sometimes the tension is physical: Pending Mobile <\/em>(2024) literalizes (and reverses) the proverbial fitting of a square into a circle with its round ball stretched through a gridded cube, looking ready to burst. Her works are best described with active verbs\u2014stretched, pierced, bent, suspended\u2014never static, but always on a precipice. Doubling down on all the dualities, Celeste often participates in two-person shows: with Gordon Hall at Document Gallery in Chicago in 2025; with Eric Oglander at Swivel Gallery in New York in 2023; and with Vivian Springford this past spring, also at Swivel.<\/p>\n \n\tOn some level, Celeste sees her sculptures as self-portraits\u2014not literally, exclusively, or even consciously, but in the sense that most, if not all, artwork reflects something of the sensibility of the artist. She sees herself in the push-pull, describing her inner world as \u201ctumultuous\u201d and naming a split sense of belonging among different worlds\u2014Black and Jewish, feminine and androgynous, to name just a few listed on her website. Still, for Celeste, all the tension \u201cfeels almost romantic.\u201d I was surprised by that adjective\u2014romantic yoga balls and bowling balls?\u2014but then convinced. After all, she manages to make decidedly discrete things harmonize beautifully, despite their dissonances.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/columns\/kiah-celeste-studio-museum-elegant-sculpture-1234788195\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/New-Talent-2026-Web-Banner_Kiah.jpg?w=1000″] Kiah Celeste trained as a photographer, majoring in the medium at SUNY Purchase. But after school, she abandoned it quickly, frustrated by all the rules that accompany such a technical pursuit. When I visited her Brooklyn live\/work studio, it was brimming with sculptures, and I asked her if she thought she used […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1978498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1978498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978498\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1978498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1978498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1978498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Ouroboros-1.jpg?w=400\")
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