Kiah Celeste’s Found Objects Romanticize Mundanity

Combining discarded housewares and industrial waste such as coffee mugs, CDs, steel pipes, and spandex in unusual and unlikely ways, Celeste investigates the connections between humans and the environment. She draws visual parallels between vertebrae and coffee cups, sea shells and spandex, creating compelling new realities that seem strangely new and familiar. This intriguing artist has worked and exhibited nationally and internationally—from Abu Dhabi, Lisbon, and Milan, to Chicago and New York City. Art & Object talked with the artist about her art and process.

Megan D Robinson: What drew you to work with found objects?

Kiah Celeste: The first iteration . . . came out of necessity. I was asked to participate in a last minute pop-up exhibition while I was working as an art handler in Abu Dhabi back in 2019. At the time, I was studio-less, moneyless, and had no materials– but said yes anyway. I did the only thing that made sense to me and walked around aimlessly looking for some quality trash. I found the unknowns in going about material gathering in this way exhilarating, challenging, and so much more rewarding than buying new, environmentally unsustainable, lacking in any history or character of said object, not to mention– free. 

Since then I’ve continued that process with an established system. Practicing environmentally conscious ways of living is a priority to me in all aspects of my life, and my art making is no exception. In fact, if there’s any time and place to practice sustainability, it’s within the thing you care most dearly about. To bring corruption, destruction, and over-consumption into it is an insult and contradiction to what you’re creating.  

MDR: I love the visual interplay of your work. Why do you like to play with this paradoxical reframing of industrial and urban materials as natural objects?

KC: The organic qualities of such industrial or synthetic objects are often already present to me. It’s my facilitation of the objects which draw attention to the connections I am already seeing– exposing the irony that many of these hyper functional/industrial objects inherently allude to some human physicality, often thanks to their very functionality, which can relate to or has been engineered with provocation by some natural process or form.

I rarely use natural materials (excluding wood, which doubles as an industrial material) because I don’t believe they need my help to expose the beauty they already possess with zero intervention. It’s more interesting to me to meddle with materials that were never meant to have aesthetic value, and translate them into contrasting forms of visceral endowment.  

MDR: How is identity important in your work?

KC: Originally it was completely unimportant to me, rather, I was attempting to escape any notion of individuality. Unsurprisingly, this was futile since art making is never a totally selfless endeavor, and I realized the balancing and contrasting forms took on a personification of my character. 

My search for belonging, support, and embrace despite or perhaps because of my own contrasting in-betweens and seemingly disparate personal qualities caused me to find respite in my work by creating a visual and physical portrayal of what that feels like to me.

MDR: Your work has a poetic sensibility. How important are texture and color to the development of your visual themes?

KC: I am all about texture, materiality, and color. They are entirely what make up the work. You can go deeper into form and weight etc. and then all the rest, but for me it simply begins and ends there. 

MDR: Literal and figurative balance is important in your work, can you talk about that?

KC: The literal balance often taking place in my work alludes to a metaphoric balance, if that’s what you mean. Just as the literal tension, pressure and/or embrace accompanied with it take on an intimate feel, one might feel a poetic sensibility that this is a literal metaphor on the cruciality of enforcing balance for any union to work.

MDR: What do you want people to know about your work? What do you hope viewers experience through your work?

KC: I hope they will feel a sense of satisfaction, a wash of bliss while experiencing my work (as I do while making it), akin to the tingles one gets when your back gets scratched in just that right way, and will leave looking at the world differently, to romanticize mundanity and be prompted to play, while finding pleasure in sustainability.