Cruising // the stacks - Christy Gast

With the artist’s selection of works by Constanza Alarcón Tennen, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, F Taylor Colantonio, Rachel Owens, agustine zegers, and Charlap Hyman & Herrero.

Nina Johnson is pleased to announce Cruising // the stacks, opening September 4th in the Exhibition Library. Cruising, New York–based artist Christy Gast’s fifth solo presentation with the gallery, is paired with // the stacks, curated by Gast and featuring a selection of works by Constanza Alarcón Tennen, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, F Taylor Colantonio, Rachel Owens, agustine zegers, and Charlap Hyman & Herrero. The works in Cruising // the stacks filter coded desire, ecological research, and the politics of knowledge through twisted textiles, dye-vat poetics, and somatic engagement—inviting viewers to read with their bodies.

Constanza Alarcón Tennen, Whistle (part of the SUDAMERICANA TIENE MEMORIA DEL AIRE series), 2025. Clay whistle with two tones, 9 x 5 x 8 in.

Gast approached Cruising with the spirit of “flirting in the library,” pulling fleeting references and material poetry into each piece. Resist, Rust, Press appears to be a quick assemblage: crisp-flat Levi’s pinned to the wall with a piece of wood, á la Charles Ray’s two-part photographic work, Plank Piece (1973), which documents the artist suspended (or impaled) against the wall by a wooden plank. In Gast’s piece, the surface pattern on the denim was achieved with two resist-dye techniques and the application of rust to “sadden” the goldenrod yellow, and all dimensionality was removed by repeatedly passing the jeans through a printing press. The wood is one of many beaver-carved sticks that Gast has collected near her home in Dutchess County, New York, and still bears the animals’ teeth marks.

Christy Gast, Resist, Rust, Press , 2025. Cotton, denim, acrylic, goldenrod dye, interference pigment, beaver stick, metal, graphite, 53 x 29 x 24 in.

Mussel Notes is a Möbius-like loop of dungarees, with three twisting turns and a leg that folds back on itself, suspended from a quotidian metal bookshelf bracket. Scrawled in graphite on the garment’s pearlescent surface are notes describing the freshwater mussel’s uncanny reproductive cycle. Though blind and brainless, the animal forms its tongue into a fleshy lure and mimics the movement of a prey fish or insect, only to glitter-bomb its own spawn into the predator’s gills where they hitchhike upstream until they drop off to seed a new colony. The mussel’s strategy—seductive, indirect, and astonishingly effective—mirrors the work’s own looping logic and sensual camouflage.

Christy Gast, Mussel Notes , 2025. Poly-cotton, fiber-fill, acrylic, interference pigment, graphite, metal shelf bracket, 73 x 14 x 9 in.

Don’t Panic takes the form of a single jeans leg looped so the cuffed ankle slips neatly into the waist, forming a closed, self-consuming circuit. Radial wrinkles gather around the back pocket, but the denim remains taut across the outer curve to clearly spell “Don’t Panic” in punk studs, a nod to the “Dyke Tactics” studded leather jacket from the Lesbian Herstory Archives.

The remaining works in Cruising are playful, fragmented, and evocative in their materials and gestures. For Gloria, a found quilt top with the classic fan motif established the logic for folding and pleating that Gast used for the resist application of goldenrod and cochineal dye, and for the piece’s pleated form. It crawls up the wall from the pocket of cut-off vintage denim, polished to a sheen like Gloria Vanderbilt’s kaleidoscopic, patchwork-encrusted bedroom. An oversized key hangs from an indigo-dyed beaver stick peg. A fragmented denim derriere entreats viewers to “READ.”

Christy Gast, Gloria, 2025. Vintage handmade quilt top, goldenrod dye, cochineal dye, acrylic, pigment, wrought iron, canvas, fiber-fill, 57 x 60 x 9 in.

For // the stacks, presented within the Charlap Hyman & Herrero–designed flexible library shelves and the gallery windows, Gast has selected work that echoes the quiet intensity and coded intimacy of cruising itself—pieces that invite close reading, sensory attunement, and embodied engagement.

Rachel Owens, Origin Vase (with spud buds), 2025. Marble dust and resin, Vase: 7.25 x 3.25 x 1.5 in., Spuds: 1.5 x 1.5 x 1.5 in. each.

Rachel Owens’ “stained glass” Origin Horizon filters light like planetary dawn through embedded casts of 3D-scanned fossils from the Devonian-era terrestrial ecosystem that produced the conditions for life to form on Earth. Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas’ quilt is anchored by two blue silk squares (scraps from a grandmother’s kimono) framed by hand-dyed acid red and cochineal swatches of linen, cotton and silk in an off-kilter log cabin motif. It emits a pink glow.

Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, Together We Could, 2020. Linen, cotton, and silk, 90 x 70 in.

Olfactory artist agustine zegers’s scent diffuses the space with notes of warm skin, sweat, incense, and the mustiness of old paper. Constanza Alarcón Tennen’s unglazed ceramic whistle, an Andean form that the artist first adapted for the 2019 Chilean street protests, is activated by pursing one’s lips around a clay finger and exhaling—filling the space with a preverbal coo. F Taylor Colantino’s glowing cartapesta lamps and Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s stuffed hand pillows set the perfect stage for whispering among the stacks.

Cruising // the stacks will be on view in the Exhibition Library through November 15th, 2025.

Charlap Hyman & Herrero, Hand Pillow in Lena, 2025. Vintage Kimono Fabric on Down & Feather Pillow, 20 x 12 x 3 in.

About Christy Gast

Christy Gast (b. 1976, Ohio) is a New York-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans sculpture, performance, video, and textiles. Her work is rooted in field research and collaborative practices, as well as complex textile constructions. Gast was a founding member of the research collective Ensayos, through which she spent 15 years working on issues of ecological storytelling in Tierra del Fuego and other archipelagos.

Gast has exhibited internationally, both solo and with Ensayos, in New York at the New Museum, MoMA/P.S.1, Performa, Artists Space and the River Valley Arts Collective; in Miami at Pérez Art Museum Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Nina Johnson Gallery, Locust Projects; and at American University Museum (DC), Galería Patricia Ready (Santiago), Kadist (Paris), MABA and Le19 (France), the University of Queensland Art Museum (Australia), Estonian Contemporary Art Museum, and the Chilean Pavilion of the 59th Venice Biennale (with Ensayos), among others. Her work is held in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, the Ohio State University, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. She has received support from NYSCA, the Art Matters Foundation, Tigertail, South Florida Cultural Consortium, and the American Austrian Foundation. She holds an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University and dual BFA/BA degrees in Sculpture and Women’s Studies from The Ohio State University. She also studied with Valie Export at the Internationale Sommerakademie für Bildende Kunst in Salzburg and at the University of Brighton in Critical Fine Art Practices.

About Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas

Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas (they/them) is an artist, educator, and activist living and working on the traditional lands of the Alabama-Coushatta, Caddo, Carrizo/ Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Comanche, Kickapoo, Lipan Apache, Tonkawa and Ysleta Del Sur Pueblo (Austin, TX).

Barhaugh-Bordas’s practice—spanning print media, installation, and social and collaborative work—explores the intersections of migration, queerness, and ecology. Through a process of thinking-through-making, they investigate how art can foster ecological knowledge and interspecies understanding, beginning with a comparison of “naturalization” stories—becoming local—between Americans and non-native plants.

Barhaugh-Bordas has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions at the Printshop LA Gallery, Handwerker Gallery (Ithaca College, New York), Buffalo Arts Studio, and Sediment Arts (Richmond, VA). Artist residencies include Casa Lü Parque (Mexico City), ACRE (Steuben, Wisconsin), Women’s Studio Workshop (Rosendale, NY), the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University (New York), MI-Lab (Echizen, Japan), and Kala Art Institute (Berkeley, CA).

About F Taylor Colantonio

F Taylor Colantonio (b. 1988, Boston, USA; lives and works in Rome, Italy) earned an MFA in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design in 2013 and apprenticed with an important maestro of papier-mâché in the very southern tip of Puglia. Colantonio is primarily known for his work in a material unique to his practice, polished cartapesta, which he formulated through years of research and continues to develop. In 2022, his presentation 53 Miles West of Venus was exhibited by Salon 94 Design in Paris, and he has been included in group exhibitions at galleries including R & Company and Object & Thing, and previously with Nina Johnson Gallery. Recently, Colantonio created a suite of bronze works in collaboration with the French couture house Schiaparelli, which are now on view permanently in the Schiaparelli salons at Place Vendôme, Paris. His solo exhibition, Frutti di Mare, was presented by Object & Thing in Venice from April-June 2024.

About Charlap Hyman & Herrero

Charlap Hyman & Herrero is a Los Angeles/New York–based architecture and design firm that takes a fully integrated approach to conceptualizing and executing spaces in their totality. Principals Adam Charlap Hyman and Andre Herrero, whose backgrounds are in interior design and architecture, lead a practice that considers all aspects of the built environment, from site plan to furniture. Working in various typologies—including buildings, set designs, stores, and houses—CHH endeavors to consider divergent art forms and the experiences of multiple senses.

About Rachel Owens

Rachel Owens’s work addresses environmental issues, the consumption of natural resources, and the social conditions that sustain them. Working across sculpture, performance, and social practice, she treats material as meaning: what a sculpture is made of is what it means and what it does. She has used bottle shards, cardboard, coal, dismantled Humvees, and marble dust to convey emotion and action, shaping them into forms from porches to ancient trees that link disparate objects and eras. In her recent project Future Fossils, Owens casts the fossilized remains of what is considered the world’s oldest forest (400 million years old). Evoking stained glass, these works emit a celestial glow, elevating the rocks to their status as our plant ancestors.

Owens has been included in exhibitions in the United States and internationally including the X Krasnoyarsk Bienalle (Russia); Franco Soffiantino Contemporary (Turin, Italy); Austrian Cultural Forum New York; the Frist Art Museum (Nashville); Socrates Sculpture Park (New York); and the New Museum window series (New York), among others. Her solo museum project, The Hypogean Tip, commissioned for the Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport, Connecticut, subsequently traveled to the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in New York City. Her reviews and written work have been included in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, Flash Art, and Triple Canopy Anthology. She has received grants from the Joan Mitchell, Pollock-Krasner, and Harpo Foundations, as well as a Cultural Humanitarian Grant from the US Consulate. Her work can be found in many collections in the United States and abroad.

Owens is Professor of Art & Design and Chair of the Sculpture Department at SUNY Purchase College. She lives and works in Amenia, New York.

About Constanza Alarcón Tennen

Constanza Alarcón Tennen (b. Santiago, 1986) is a Chilean artist working across sound, sculpture, video, and performance. Her practice explores transmaterial dialogues—inhabiting the in-between space of materials and objects—and, in recent years, has focused on fiction, eroticism, and haptics as lenses for engaging with both human and non-human worlds.

She received her BFA from the Universidad Católica de Chile and an MFA in Sculpture at Yale University in 2015. Her work has been shown internationally at venues such as PS122 (New York), Patricia Ready Gallery (Santiago), the 13th Media Arts Biennial (Santiago), Künstlerforum-Bonn (Germany), Atelierhaus Salzamt (Linz, Austria), the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, among others. She has participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Delfina Foundation (London), and B.A.S.E Tsonami (Valparaíso, Chile). She published her first poetry compilation as an artist’s book with Otra Sinceridad, a Chilean independent press. Alarcón Tennen works as a teacher and lives between Santiago and Boston.

About agustine zegers

agustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and student of atmospheric biopolitics. Their work attends to the nourishing and noxious transcorporealities we share as inhabitants of Earth, offering forms of communion with ecological collapse at the scale of the molecule and breath. They have scented and exhibited at venues such as: the Venice Biennale, 52 Walker (New York), Prairie (Chicago), Center for Performance Research (New York), and Sharjah Art Foundation (United Arab Emirates). They currently live on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: the Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations, colonially known as Chicago.

NinaJohnson

Christy Gast: Cruising // the stacks