Celeste del Valle’s Pairidaēza:
Reimagining Eden

by Iker Veiga

Still from Krista Gay’s “BLACK PUSSY.” Image by Liam Murray (@14parkplace).

 
The self-appointed “home for the arts” in New York City, Westbeth Artists Housing, has stood resilient for 55 years at the corner of Bethune and Washington Streets. Founded in the 1970s to provide affordable housing for artists and their families, the building—with a concrete courtyard, rehearsal spaces, and a gallery—remains a hub for both emerging creatives and curators, as well as longtime residents who never left the Richard Meier-renovated structure. It was in Westbeth’s 2,900-square-foot gallery space that curator Celeste del Valle opened her first show on January 10th, until the 26th of the same month. With an academic background in public policy and political advocacy, the history of this New York landmark is particularly significant to del Valle’s exhibition: Pairidaēza.

Del Valle completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Chicago, but after working at Heaven Gallery in the same city, she began exploring curatorial work. She continued engaging with the arts in work and free time after moving to New York. Pairidaēza explores the concept of “paradise” through various references, including Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” and Hieronymus Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights”—an interest of the curator’s that was sparked after taking a course on the painting at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Both a reflection on traditional depictions of heaven and a generative critique of idealized imaginings of paradise, the project asks viewers to consider the history of these depictions from a sociological perspective. The ritual here becomes secular, prompting convergence and questioning our own conceptions of Eden. Drawing on the Avestan etymology of the term—Pairidaēza meaning “enclosed garden” in the ancient Zoroastrian language—del Valle invites visitors to reflect on who is allowed to enter these sites of transcendence.

From left to right: Sasha Fishman’s  “She keeps untangling from her cage,“ Charlie Manion’s “Listener,” Sam Sherman’s “Page 175 (Monticelli, Van Ostade, Ryckaert, Van Ostade).” Image by Liam Murray (@14parkplace).

The exhibition was 3D-modeled with the help of architect and collaborator Dave Hurley and featured works by seven artists: Ali Kaeini, Sam Sherman, Krista Gay, Kate Stone, Kitty Rauth, Sasha Fishman, and Charlie Manion. In an effort to diversify the practices, images, and interpretations of Eden highlighted in Pairidaēza, del Valle sent each artist a brief presentation on her bibliography and introduced them to Benjamin’s writing as a point of reference. Through her research, del Valle sought out creatives working across diverse media whose practices aligned with her curatorial vision. The result is a remarkably cohesive multimedia exhibition in which explorations of materiality, social justice, religion, and futurity guide the viewer smoothly through the space. Del Valle aimed to curate a seamless exhibit, in which thematic and visual connections become evident to the viewer; she refuses to offer prescriptive readings of the exhibition. Instead, she finds pride in inviting her viewers to independently engage in conversations about the art on display, growing from these conversations as both a curator and researcher.

As we enter the gallery, Sasha Fishman’s “Riboflavin” draws the audience around its spiraling yellow streams of B complex, with a urine-like odor rising from the B12 vitamin dissolved in water. Youth is framed critically in Fishman’s interpretation of Pairidaēza, a set of works that explore the mythical, the natural and scientific, and the social through an actualizing lens. It is a reimagined fountain of youth for the time of ozempic and vitamin shots: its spiraling invites the viewer in, but the artificial nature of the fluid’s color makes us question its benefits. This piece is followed by Kitty Rauth’s disintegrating objects, the “Wilting Series.” The items in Rauth’s project—candles and glasses—retain parts of their functionality but seem to lose form under the viewer’s gaze. Her practice reflects on table manners and etiquette, drawing inspiration from the Victorian era, and viewing the dinner table as a secular space where cultural impositions and custom become devotional. Rauth pushes the boundaries of these objects’ physicality to question the limits of their functionality as they metaphorically and physically melt away. Her work reflects on material decay in an age that, like Fishman suggests, prioritizes aesthetics and social acceptance to a dehumanizing extent.

From left to right: Ali Kaeni’s “Aazi” and “Tehran after Aazi (Boom!),“ Krista Gay’s “Winner Winner,”  and Ali Kaeni’s  “Untitled (Smoky Tehran after Aazi).” Image by Liam Murray (@14parkplace).

The main hallway of the gallery is framed by Charlie Manion’s “Listener” and Ali Kaeini’s disassembled and reconstructed fabric banners. Side by side, at the end of the gallery, these pieces converse in their synthetic and crafty opposition. Nonetheless, the natural and the technological, the whole and the incomplete, intersect here once the viewer looks closely. Kaeini’s fabric pieces are stitched together, forming patterns that reflect on material provenance and historical rewritings through craft in response to the Iranian diaspora. Manion’s electronics are covered by an enveloping cast that disrupts their sleek, robotic finish. Both artworks explore media diffusion, and consider the different frameworks from which they elaborate historical narratives.

From left to right: Sasha Fishman’s  “If I can predict where“ and “The water might be,” and Kate Stone’s  “Dreamhouse.”  Image by Liam Murray (@14parkplace).

A sense of time, assemblage, and sedimentation pervades many works in the gallery space. Kate Stone’s “The Timekeeper” overlaps multiple notions of temporality, as chairs fuse with one another and, similarly to Manion’s work, are consumed by accumulating debris. Deconstructing the mode of a Victorian woven chair, Stone crafts a modern myth that traps and reinvents these narratives and reflects on the history of furniture. Historical, social, and material layers are exposed in Pairidaēza as a means to study different reworkings of social and religious narratives and the mythification of visions of “paradise.” In his figurative-style painting, Sam Sherman expands on historical and social narratives of disappearance by creating scaled copies of artwork looted by the Nazis during different invasions and only recorded in French insurance claims made by Jewish families. The real-life paintings were never found and most are thought to be destroyed. By participating in the tradition of copyist artisans, and reimagining how these pieces would be presented today, Sherman breathes new life into stolen masterpieces and crafts an alternative futurity for these paintings to exist in.

Charlie Manion’s “Clock.” Image by Liam Murray (@14parkplace).

In a coherent way, the art displayed here honors times past while nurturing its potentiality as an entity in itself: time is envisioned as a reconstructive force through which positive, collective approaches to “paradise” could be generated. As del Valle puts it in our conversation, the politics of Pairidaēza are ultimately “aspirational,” understanding spirituality as a very personal, yet considerate towards the collective, connection to the arts, rather than as a prescribed doctrine. This ever-evolving aim for community care is perhaps best embodied in one of the rooms that branches off from the main hall of the gallery. There, Krista Gay’s “BLACK PUSSY” is projected onto a wall, its digital format contrasting with every crack of the white gallery wall. Influenced by Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” the video piece revisits film archives and repurposes raw materials “to build a different future”—a counterhistory for those who died during the Middle Passage, one through which visitors may be mobilized.

Ultimately, del Valle’s Pairidaēza engages directly with what she refers to as postcolonial “paradise discourse,” referencing Sharae Deckard’s homonymous text—a series of forms of speech popular in imperialist societies that emphasize the dichotomy between the metropolis and the outskirts, presenting the center of the Empire as an exclusionary “heaven,” while the periphery is considered exile. Through this project, del Valle affirms, “We ought to move on from the concept of paradise as something exclusionary and self-preserving, and re-present it as an idea that preserves the whole community—a spirituality that does not seek salvation for the individual, but rather for the masses.” Pairidaēza brings its audience together in its complex simplicity: the gallery, and all the artworks in it, function as an interconnected network, an idiosyncratic catalog that progresses onwards in one shared direction. From its conception, Pairidaēza emphasizes collaboration—between artists, designers, curators, and the Westbeth team. Del Valle is not shy about professing her love for artist-run spaces, apartment galleries, and alternative curatorial practices. Pairidaēza is only the first step in a career that will, without a doubt, carry this critique and appreciation of togetherness both within and outside institutional spaces.
                                                           
     

From left to right: Kitty Rauth’s “Wilting Series,” Sasha Fishman’s “Riboflavin.” Image by Liam Murray (@14parkplace).