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. 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. 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. Our special thanks to Saint Fleur Inc. for their generosity in facilitating this exhibition. Vivian Springford (b. 1913), The American abstract painter Vivian Springford (1913-2003) provides a fascinating case study of a mid-century American woman artist. Working first in an Abstract Expressionist and then in a Color Field vocabulary, she was active in multiple facets of the New York art world from the 1950s to 1970s, during which time she had solo and group exhibitions with the Great Jones Gallery, the Preston Gallery, Women in the Arts, and the Visual Arts Coalition. Kiah Celeste (b. 1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-dimensional artist whose work transcends fitting into one category or medium. Upon completing a BFA inPhotography in 2016, Kiah moved into three dimensional production. She has completed artist residencies and exhibitions within the US and internationally including Lisbon, Barcelona, New York, Chicago and Italy. In 2021, Celeste received the inaugural 21C Artadia Award in Louisville, KY and the inaugural Suzanne Fitzallen Jackson Foundation Residency in 2025. Her work has been acquired by the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum and the UK Art Museum. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Burnaway, and ArtForum.

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