Celeste Roberge

Celeste Roberge was born in Biddeford, Maine, and received her art education at the Maine College of Art, the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, and the Skowhegan School of Painting. She lives in Gainesville, Florida, where she is an Associate Professor of Sculpture at the School of Art and Art History, University of Florida. Her primary artistic concern lies in examining the intersection between geological and human time.

She writes: “I was inspired by the absurd desire to embed antique sofas in thousands of pounds of dry-stacked stone in such a way that the furniture would seem like a fossil within a stone road-cut or like an archaic funerary monument extruded from the earth. Although we like to imagine that cultural artifacts, such as furniture and art, exist free of time and decay, the material conditions of the world inevitably recoup them.”

Synergizing conceptual and aesthetic concerns, her juxtapositions of fragile furnishings against stark masses of layered stone call to mind the disparate ways in which we view temporality as regards objects of human and organic origins. They center the viewer’s experience on the visceral impact of collided opposites: the fabricated pressed between the organic, the inviting caught in the threatening, and the ephemeral embedded within the enduring. Through these assemblages of river rocks, fabricated steel, and soft upholstery, Roberge asks her viewers both to abstract time and to sense its immediacy.

Roberge occasionally pares her compositions down to diminutive proportions in order to invite the attention demanded by work of a miniature scale. Many of these smaller works make references to such well known earlier artists as Donald Judd and Meret Oppenheim, and thus probe the complicated issues of originality and authorship. Her miniatures commonly tend toward such slenderness that balance is underscored as a central component in their visual drama. Here, solitary objects (as diverse as chairs, lamps, and even pianos) crowning columns of sediment appear to hover over a vast abyss.

Roberge is also known to create sculptures that engage dynamically with exterior environments. Commonly, these invert the hierarchy of objects established in her larger stacks. In Chaise Gabion, 1,350 pounds of river rocks are compressed into the shape of a chaise lounge by surrounding computer- designed matrices of waterjet cut stainless steel. Though her other sculptures frequently subvert the conception that manufactured objects may forever dominate our landscapes, these works explore an alternative possibility.

Celeste Roberge has exhibited extensively in solo exhibitions as well as important group shows. Her work is held in such collections as the Portland Museum of Art, the Farnsworth Art Museum, and Emory University. Widely acclaimed, Roberge has been awarded the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, twice received the Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, earned a Bunting Fellowship to the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, and holds a Research Foundation Professorship at the University of Florida.