All the best, Kiah Celeste

DOCUMENT is pleased to announce Kiah Celeste’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and the artist’s first presentation in Chicago.

“Life today is very bewildering,” the textile artist Anni Albers wrote in 1938. “It is no accident that nervous breakdowns occur more often in our civilization than in those where creative power had a natural outlet in daily activities. And this fact leads to a suggestion: we must come down to earth from the clouds where we live in vagueness, and experience the most real thing there is: material.”

Life today, in 2022, remains as bewildering as ever, yet All the Best, Kiah Celeste makes a compelling argument for coming down from the digital clouds and experiencing what Albers would call “the adventure of being close to the stuff the world is made of.” 

In the half-dozen sculptures Celeste created for the exhibition, material is the adventure, evidence of a tactile thinking that can excavate aesthetic pleasure from the rubbish heaps of contemporary industrial culture.

Some artists begin with an idea and procure the materials to create it, resulting in works that often look pretty much like the visions in their heads. Celeste’s process is much more precarious — with results that don’t so much reward her riskiness as reflect her skillfulness in teasing out relationships among forms and materials, imbuing the overlooked and invisible with purpose and significance.

Read the full press release here. 

About Kiah Celeste

Kiah Celeste (b. 1994, Brooklyn, NY) lives and works in Louisville, KY. In 2016 she received her BFA from SUNY College at Purchase. Recent solo exhibitions include: Swivel Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, KMAC Museum, Louisville, KY, Quappi Projects, Louisville, KY, and Centre d’Art La Rectoria, Sant Pere De Vilamajor, Barcelona, Spain. Her work has been included in exhibitions at the University of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY, Georgetown College, Georgetown, KY, Josephine Sculpture Park, Frankfort, KY, and Dadapost, Berlin, Germany. She has completed artist residencies in Barcelona, Vienna, Frankfort, KY and has exhibited internationally in Abu Dhabi, Berlin, and Spain. In 2021, she was the recipient of the Louisville Artadia Award.

Image Credit: Kiah Celeste, Bum 81, 2022, Fluorescent light tubes, forklift wheel, 20h x 90w x 20d in