ARTIST STATEMENT

I’m a sculptor and performance artist in search of a place that does not yet exist.  I imbue my pieces with a single intention: that these operate as protective amulets over vulnerable individuals and communities. Invoking reappropriation theory, I work from ancient, medieval and modern rituals, iconography, and ceremonial objects to sublimate contemporary diasporic experiences of violence. Weaponized words, images and objects become tools for protection, self-determination, compassion, and survival. I create at the fraught intersection of myriad histories and experiences: queerness and the daily experience of being femme, of having/having had a womb, of single motherhood & matrilineal oral traditions, of the unavoidable truth of my Jewish blood, of an intersectional progressive activist ethos, of the inevitability of failure and the impossibility of safety. Materially maximalist and conceptually saturated, my works draw from art history, social criticism, pop culture, current politics and reporting, and individual and collective memory. While rooted in the images, tastes, smells, and sounds of my 1990s Brooklyn Jewish childhood and the Eastern European Jewish diaspora of my ancestry, I operate from both specific and universal positions. I’m intrigued by the capacity for a single object, gesture, or tenet to hold significance for vastly different people. Inherently Jewish, my work relies upon humor, wit, and irony in a perpetual search for nuance in a world of binary insistence, how to be both/and, how to hold rage and softness in simultaneity: how to be a Jewess both in this moment, or in an imagined possible future.

BIO

Chelsea Steinberg Gay (b. 1986, Brooklyn, NY) is a New York-based fine artist. She holds an MFA in Fine Art from Parsons School of Design, an MA in Jewish Art & Visual Culture from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, and a BFA in Sculpture from SUNY Purchase College. She is an alumn of LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and the Performing Arts in New York.She was the founder of Salon 690, a monthly salon and group crit for women artists living in Fairfield County. Her works have been exhibited domestically and internationally, as part of the Sixth Edition of the Jerusalem Biennale, at the Dr. Bernard Heller Museum at Hebrew Union College, the Neuberger Museum of Art at Purchase College, 25East Gallery, and the Sheila Johnson Design Center Gallery. Her public art work consisting of an installation housed inside a 1969 Lincoln Continental was exhibited on Fifth Avenue in 2023, as part of the Parsons MFA exhibition Matter As Fallen Light. She has performed at the Bronx River Arts Center, in the DUMBO Art Under the Bridge Festival, at The John L. Tishman Auditorium at The New School for Social Research, and at Unity EcoVillage in Kobina-Ansa, Ghana. Her work has been featured in AJS Perspectives, The Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s Jewish Week, The Jerusalem Post, Exponent II, Sunstone Magazine, and Lilith Magazine.

 

Curriculum Vitae and/or Available Works PDFs may be requested by contacting us.