State Change

STATE CHANGE

Apr 3 - May 24, 2026

Healing can require a deliberate undertaking of transformation. It calls for the courage to develop the capacity to bring caring attention to trauma and suffering in the conscious and subconscious, personal and collective, human and more‑than‑human.

As we live through the devastation of globalization and consequently the loss of roughly a hundred entire species every day, strength and sustenance can be found within the animist understandings of Radical Ecopsychology, the legacy of Surrealist tactics of dissent, and the ancient metaphysics of Alchemy.

Melding the wisdom of these practices, this collection of work provides a potent container for exploring the dynamic relationships between the elemental forces that create our reality. These sculptures, paintings, and collages embody the changes of state inherent to cycles of transformation, as they naturally move through one phase to the next, like the experience of awakening. Wood becomes flame, water becomes steam. Winter becomes spring, the domesticated becomes rewilded.

STATE CHANGE is an invitation to honor our grief and rage. Collectively holding these challenging emotions instead of numbing or distracting ourselves from them, even if just for a moment, is what enables entrance into the fullness of our fierce love for each other and the wildness that remains in the world.

Artist Bio

Celeste Neuhaus (she/they) is a multimodal artist and witch. Their work constellates magic, ecology, and healing. Through sculptural objects, installations, paintings, performance videos, and guided rituals, their art incites the transmutation of the grievous consequences of amalgamated systems of oppression and resulting biodiversity annihilation. Incorporating polysemic symbolism, alchemical surrealism, the absurd and the erotic, her work vividly materializes the often subconscious interdependencies between the somatic, psychological, political, ecological, and cosmological.

Three decades of experience living with multiple chronic illnesses have catalyzed Celeste’s tenacious research into a spectrum of healing modalities and their corresponding metaphysics. Her insights from these inquiries, along with her devotion to ancient magical practices, continuously shape the forms of her work. Originally from Chicago and raised by the wild shores of Lake Michigan, their practice is nourished by a Post Graduate Certification in Ecopsychology from Pacifica Graduate School, and rooted in their MFA from the University of New Mexico's Land Arts program in Art and Ecology. Their research deeply engages with conceptual rigor, material exploration, and embodied experience. This grounds her approach to art-making as an agent of discovery and transformation.

Celeste's offerings have been encountered in museums, magic temples, vacant lots, tree farms, art galleries, riverboats, salt flats, rooftops, and fields of wildflowers. Her work is held in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art and the University of Illinois Chicago, and she has been an artist-in-residence at esteemed programs such as ACRE, Harold Arts Residency, and The Studio for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.

Local and national performances and exhibitions include: the Carnegie Museum of Art, The Mattress Factory, SPACE Gallery (Pittsburgh, PA), Submersive HQ (Baltimore, MD) White Page Gallery (Minneapolis, MN), Indiana University (Indianapolis, IN), Sanitary Tortilla Factory (Albuquerque, NM), Comfort Station (Chicago, IL), School of Visual Art (New York, NY), and P.A.A.J. (Los Angeles, CA).


celesteneuhaus.com/
​@celesteneuhaus

Celeste Neuhaus