Celeste (b. Chicago) is an artist currently based in Washington, DC, whose process-driven practice hybridizes painting, drawing, and construction. She approaches painting as a living system, allowing gravity, surface tension, bodily gesture, and the behavior of materials to actively shape the formation of each work. Through these material negotiations, her paintings invite viewers into shifting states of perception. With contrasting dense, intricate mark-making with vast, atmospheric washes, they alternately enclose and release the viewer, gathering and dispersing attention. Physical and psychological experience intertwine with environmental and dreamlike traces, allowing multiple modes of attention to coexist within a single encounter.