CELESTE FICHTER | Chat Room | MELANIE’S OFFICE
January 19 - February 28, 2025
With insight and a quiet deadpan humor, Celeste Fichter’s inventive work encourages the viewer to see the world sideways – where the dominant culture that dictates value is not in charge. Embracing what the mainstream casts aside as unimportant, her work insists that significance is in the eye of the beholder and the hands of the maker. Influenced by Arte Povera, Fluxus, Duchamp and the life inherent in humble subjects and readymade materials, she makes work that incorporates photography, video, found objects, collage, installation, multiples and artists books to give voice to the mundane and celebrates the everydayness of things.
"Chat Room is an ongoing project where I make connections and build relationships between unrelated subjects. Acting as a matchmaker of materials, I gather images and found objects from multiple analog and digital sources until I spot potential relationships.
I pair elements based on formal considerations (shape, color, pattern) and content (meaning, function, symbolism). My starting point is often a made or found image that I treat as an object. Baked Alaska, for example, is comprised of a discolored photograph of an erupting volcano paired with a hardboard corner (used to square stretcher bars) covered with red rosin paper (used to protect flooring). The triangular shape of the volcano is mirrored above the inverse triangular shape of the corner. Blue and yellow have faded from the photograph leaving it the same shade of magenta as the rosin paper. The formal simpatico of a shared geometry and color create the chemistry that draw these two together in a union that hints at something greater than the sum of its parts. By putting objects that have nothing in common, in common, new alliances are created and matches are made.
Though each work is created one at a time, associations among works often arise and unexpected conversations emerge. I like to think of these as group chats, and the walls where the works live as a chat room – a sort of meeting place. When installed, the groupings are choreographed in the space to further reveal to the viewer an unfamiliar universe, despite its familiar components."
PROJECT SPACE
CELESTE FICTHER - Found Found
On view: February 3 - March 11, 2022
“A driving force in my work involves an insistence on the power of modesty. The objects I employ are humble and address overlooked and unattended details. In the process of creating new order, I examine how our culture defines value as most of the material I use is without monetary worth or cultural merit. Recontextualizing artless actors allows me to expose the randomness of how value is assigned. To me the championing of the underdog is a political act. All choices I make in the production of a work reflect this core concern. How a photograph is printed, the previous use of the life implicit in a found object, and how the work is exhibited is part of the message and is spoken in the same vernacular as the idea that drove it there.
Found Found is a visual call and response. The call begins with found vintage snapshots of people caught in the act of reading, writing, or drawing that I treat as questions; What are they looking at? What are they thinking? Who are (were) they? The answers to these questions come in the form of staged photographs that imagine what the subjects see. From the literal to the absurd, the topical to the poetic, each call from the past is responded to in the present. Each diptych is mounted on a double-sided panel that hangs on the wall on its side, spaced so that the viewer can move from the front to the back and vice versa of each piece.
Sourced from eBay and orphaned from their owners (or heirs of the subjects), the found snapshots are vernacular images from family albums from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s. I select images that depict moments that were probably considered unimportant because most of the subjects are not looking directly at the camera and do not acknowledge the viewer. This valuing of what makes a ‘good' photo (e.g. subject looking directly at the viewer) is a trope that lingers today as people pose for selfies making clear eye contact, this bias having seeped into the algorithm as well. Why do we need the subject to look at us to engage us? Doesn’t their inner life have greater value than the appearance of outer life?” - CF
Celeste Fichter holds an MFA in Photography and Related Media from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has had solo exhibitions at the Point of Contact Gallery at Syracuse University, Go North Gallery (Beacon, NY), PH Gallery (NYC), and the Boyden Gallery at St Mary's College, MD. Her work has been in group exhibitions at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Islip Art Museum, and the Bronx Museum of Art. Her work has been reviewed in the New York Times and the Village Voice. She lives and works in Brooklyn.