Review – Nov 12 2025 – Written By Camila Marambio
Tucked inside a modest annex at Nina Johnson, Cruising // the stacks, Christy Gast’s most recent exhibition, offers a tender and tactile meditation on queer desire, material kinship, and feminist world-building. While the setting evokes the casual accessibility of a bookstore or gift shop, the richness of Gast’s subtle, deeply researched objects calls for a venue that honors their complexity. This is not a show to stumble upon—it demands to be centered.
Gast’s practice is sculptural in the broadest sense of the word—not only in form, but in the way she shapes attention, curiosity, and memory through matter. As she reflects in her studio notes, “the contrast between hard and soft” animates her thinking: body and clothing, desire and structure in constant interplay. Her chosen materials (vintage denim, found quilts, leather, lace, stainless steel studs, beaver-chewed wood) are not neutral substrates. They are storied surfaces, inscribed with use, gender, and vibrancy. Gast’s process is one of loving labor—channeling overlooked archives, gathering fragments of lesbian and feminist herstory, and reanimating them as devotional objects.
The title, Cruising // the stacks, works on many levels. To “cruise the stacks” is to seek both knowledge and connection in the aisles of libraries or archives and, more figuratively, to search through the layers of cultural sediment that have buried feminist legacies. Gast doesn’t simply unearth these stories; she renders them poetically monumental. Her work speaks to intimacy, not only between people, but between matter and maker, viewer and object.
Continue reading at https://impulsemagazine.com/symposium/cruising-the-margins-christy-gasts-intimate-materiality