Beaver Rachel Poliquin With their unique scaly tail, chainsaw teeth, powerful scent and astonishing architectural prowess, beavers are unlike any other creature in the world. Not surprisingly, the beaver has played a fascinating role in human history. Beaver explores the lives and characteristics of these exceptional creatures, from their soft fur to their architecture and their…
EXHIBITION OVERVIEW Curated by Victoria Reis, Transformer The first in the Do You Know Where Your Art Comes From? four-part exhibition series curated by Victoria Reis, Executive & Artistic Director of Transformer, and presented at American University’s Katzen Art Center in collaboration with AU’s Studio Arts Program Visiting Artists Program, Locally Sourced provides an in-depth look at the extensive…
“In and Between Geographies” brings together a group of international artists who incorporate into their practice research and thinking on issues that determine the location of the human being (physical, political, cultural) and how are this affects its life–including subjective aspects such as desire and intellectual production. From the concept of landscape, recurrent scrutiny of the natural environment from…
“I grew up in the country, in a tiny village surrounded by farmland,” artist Christy Gast says from her loft in New York City’s Chinatown. “I spent a lot of time by myself, wandering around the fields and the woods.” It’s no mystery, then, that landscape has become the central theme in her work. “The…
Beyond the End is an exhibition dedicated to a research and residency program initiated in 2010 in Tierra del Fuego by curator Camila Marambio. Over the years, the Ensayos residencies have given shape to a dialogue between artists, scientists, local inhabitants and Karukinka Natural Park. Based on the premise that only creative collaboration can efface frontiers…
Gallery Diet, Miami 2014 Text by Jarrett Earnest Christy Gast is a Tramp. And by that I don’t mean she’s a floozy, though she does know how to have a good time. I mean it in the sense of a “gentlewoman of the road”—a true adventurer who wanders the defiantly less-traveled roads of the Americas…
CHRISTY GAST “MORNING TIDE (MIAMI)” 2014 CYANOTYPE ON CANVAS CHRISTY GAST “MORNING TIDE (MIAMI)” 2014 CYANOTYPE ON CANVAS CHRISTY GAST (DETAIL) “MORNING TIDE (MIAMI)” 2014 CYANOTYPE ON CANVAS https://miaminighttide.wordpress.com/2014/06/24/146/
Beyond the End at the Kadist Art Foundation in Paris was the first exhibition of projects by artists, scientists and thinkers involved with Ensayos, a nomadic research collective based in Tierra del Fuego. I have been involved since 2010 when founder Camila Marambio invited me to the inaugural residency. Together with Marambio, who is a curator, an…
Rock Quarry 2014 HD Video 4:54 Performer: Jarrett Earnest Audio: Whiskey Noise (Felecia Carlisle, Emile Milgrim, Mindy Abovitz, Thom Wheeler Castillo, Reed Van Brunschot, Christy Gast)
KADIST Session at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle on Saturday, June 7 Where Benoit Hické, who made this event possible in the beautiful auditorium of the Galeries d’Anatomie comparée et de Paléonthologie, told us that the Museum was built on an ancient river called the Bièvre, which etymologically, derives from the word ‘beaver’ : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bi%C3%A8vre_%28river%29…
« Beyond the End » est une exposition consacrée à Ensayos, un programme de recherche et de résidence initié en 2010 en Terre de Feu (Chili) par la commissaire d’exposition Camila Marambio. Présenté en parallèle de l’exposition à la Fondation Kadist, “Dans la peau du castor” clôture une semaine d’échanges (présentations, performances, projections) réunissant artistes et chercheurs autour de questions liées à la conservation bio culturelle.…
Locust Projects, Miami 2014 From Locust Projects’ press release Locust Projects is pleased to present Inholdings, an exhibition of new work by Miami-based artist Christy Gast. The two works in this exhibition, a full-scale textile replica of a Nike Hercules missile and a single-channel video entitled War Drums refer to the Hole-in-the- Donut region of the…
Consider, for a moment, the hole-in-the-donut: a confectionary absence that signifies a presence, a sort of vortex of meaning, potentially a Rorschach test. Also the name of a place in the Everglades, the Hole-in-the-Donut (HID) is a 6,600-acre tract of wetlands. Its import, as a haven for destructive, invasive plant species amongst native ones, is not only…
Flat Rock at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, is Virginia Overton’s first solo exhibition in an American museum. The new freestanding sculptures that Overton created for the show are tenuous yet forceful assemblages of materials the artist encountered around Miami and on site at the museum. The exhibition begins with a large-scale fountain…
Nicole Cherubini, a New York-based sculptor with a strong commitment to ceramics, recently opened 500, a solo exhibition at PAMM. Cherubini’s work incorporates a personalized symbolic formalism echoing her interest in utopian craft communities. She spoke with artist Christy Gast about this, as well as feminism, motherhood, and the role of the museum.CHRISTY GAST (RAIL):…
War Drums (25 minutes, 2014) was shot in one of the few existing stands of pine forest in Dade County, near a decommissioned nuclear missile base that was on high alert during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The camera pans the horizon in a continuous circle once per minute, moving like the second hand of a…
A new freestanding sculpture by Inna Babaeva extends her fascination with mass-produced supports; a postcard stand acts as a pedestal for postcards featuring two sets of photographic images. One series of found black & white family snapshots resemble scenes from Jean Luc Godard’s 1965 film “Pierrot Le Fou”. Screenshots from the film along with the family’s photos…
A series of reconfigured bed quilts. From Gallery Diet press release for The Sleeping Cowboy and Mary/Steven Christy Gast will show a pair of textile pieces entitled The Sleeping Cowboy and Mary/Steven. Both are made of reconfigured handmade bed quilts, and reference portraits included in her recent book of photography Source, released by [NAME] Publications. Coaxing…
This past weekend, artist Christy Gast unveiled her 12-foot, bronzed fiberglass Self Portrait As The Barefoot Mailman sculpture at Bal Harbour Founder’s Circle as part of the community’s “Unscripted” public art series. The piece nods South Florida’s legendary barefoot mailmen, who walked the route between Palm Beach and Miami in the 1880s, before there were roads and Henry Flagler’s…
Once upon a time—before electronic mail was even a twinkle in a programmer’s eye—correspondence was delivered by heroic means. As the legend goes: “Neither pirates, nor sharks, nor crocodiles shall keep these carriers from their appointed rounds.” In the case of the iconic seaside U.S Mail carriers in 19th-century South Florida, coined the Barefoot Mailmen,…
Christy Gast is a Tramp. And by that I don’t mean she’s a floozy, though she does know how to have a good time. I mean it in the sense of a “gentlewoman of the road”—a true adventurer who wanders the defiantly less-traveled roads of the Americas just to see what life is like there;…
As laid out by the organizers, this “roving” show of a dozen artists that began in Miami before heading north aims for some conceptual gray area between finished and unfinished work. But mostly, it seems to add a certain tropical ebullience to the notion of process art.
This coöperative gallery, managed by a rotating crew of thirteen, opens its doors to twelve artists based in Miami who favor found objects and a process-oriented approach. Consuelo Castaneda embellishes her zigzagging abstraction with rounds of cotton and makeup sponges; Jorge Pantoja paints moody compositions on DVDs; Sinisa Kukee mounts a bulbous black resin sculpture…
A few of the locals intermingled with the art world of New York City and Miami in the huge Barn-like building of Basilica Hudson on the outskirts of the town where NADA held its 2012 Hudson art fair. The vibe is relaxed — detached from the frenzied energy of New York art gatherings — stirring genuine curiosity about the objects…
Source 2012 [NAME] Publications “Source, with transcendental passages of analogy and allegory is an invitation to a reality of Americana, slightly off, but slightly right. If “a mythology reflects it region” Source achieves a high-grade vision of Floridian, Southwestern, American mythemes—linking various locales together.” “We find curious sequences: an image of a logo “Beaver Brand Paddles…
Gallery Diet, Miami 2012 From Gallery Diet press release This new body of work investigates the collision that occurs when two notions regarding studio practice meet: Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which locates creation within a physical space, and Daniel Buren’s manifesto The Function of the Studio, which frees the artist from its…
Out of Place features ten sculptural wall works constructed almost entirely out of burlap. As a distinct shift in practice for Gast, this new body of work was conceived through an intuitive process of exchanges, meditations, and transformations in and around the artist’s studio. There, claimed objects from various arbitrary sites were manipulated into assemblages, and…
Collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami Neither pirates, nor sharks, nor crocodiles shall keep these carriers from their appointed rounds. Self Portrait as the Barefoot Mailman is installed headfirst in the ground, as if toppled by a hurricane. The faux bronze sculpture refers to the legendary barefoot mailman, who delivered mail on the first U.S.…
[NAME] Publications was founded in 2008 by Gean Moreno, a Miami-based artist and writer whose own recent works in the form of texts, prints and sculpture (undertaken collaboratively with Ernesto Oroza) document and ruminate on the building blocks of contemporary material culture. Moreno made the leap from newsprint, milk crates, speaker boxes and cast concrete…
2011 Published by Gallery Diet With an essay by Ruba Katrib Subjecting the landscape to a critique, as an art object or any object in material culture, allows one to tease out a narrative in reverse. The broad view is pictorial: mountains, clouds, horizon lines, ground cover. The details, the small pieces, even holes and…
I Saw Three Cities, Felecia Chizuko Carlisle’s solo exhibition at Dorsch Gallery, takes its title and leitmotifs from a painting by early 20th century surrealist Kay Sage. In the painting, the pictorial space is partially framed by a wrapped and windblown length of canvas resembling a massive figure with an outstretched arm. Triangular walls recede…
In 1946, a bizarre cargo shipment stopped over at the Pan American Airlines headquarters in Miami. En route to Tierra del Fuego, the southern most tip of South America, fifty North American Beavers were temporarily housed in a walk-in refrigerator maintained by the airline. The door of the fridge, however, was made of wood. This…
de la Cruz Collection, Miami 2010 From the de la Cruz Collection press release A tap dancer manipulates the literal point of connection between a performer and eponymous landscape to produce percussive song as she moves around the perimeter of Lake Okeechobee, Florida’s inland sea, via the Herbert Hoover Dike—a 30 foot high earthen berm…
2010 From the Miami Art Museum press release In this three-channel video installation, the artist uses rocks, scraps of wood and bits of broken glass to relay a folkloric narrative of two men who built an ark in a dusty, remote mountain cave deep in the Utah desert, in preparation for a second biblical flood…
Corin Hewitt’s practice fuses photography, sculpture and the sort of critical inquiry into the classification of natural and cultural objects normally undertaken by scientists and spirited amateur collectors. At Dorsch Gallery until June 5, an exhibit of Hewitt’s carefully arranged still-life photography entitled “Drying Flowers in a Microwave” features studio shots of flower arrangements…
We Live Inside the World 5 minutes 2010 Hollow Earth propaganda! The video’s point of departure is an assertion by a 19th century Utopian community in isolated coastal Florida that the Earth is a hollow sphere, cradling the entire universe inside. The video We Live Inside the World is constructed as a didactic document of performative…
A few weeks ago nearly a hundred academics, artists, educators and critics descended upon the University of North Carolina’s Asheville campus for an on-site conference examining the legacy of Black Mountain College, the first since the institution’s closure in 1957. Founded in 1933 by a group of academics and students eager to practice theories of…
Engines roaring, Jeepers conquer Potato Salad Hill while spectators watch in the right foreground from atop a building sprayed with Utopian graffiti. “The goddess is alive and magic is afoot.” Meanwhile a woman (the goddess?) demonstrates another kind of mastery, dramatically screeching as she cracks a whip which echoes through the canyon.
Canario 2008 Site-specific video & performance Created in collaboration with Nicolas Lobo and Psychic Youth Video light show and live psychedelic music performance at an abandoned marijuana grow house in a residential neighborhood deep in Dade County. All of the raw footage in the video projection was shot inside of the house, where light seeped…
Mounted Horse Men 2008 Video edition on USB stick Part sculpture, part accessory, part documentary, Mounted Horse Men is a primitive tool that, once removed from its sheath and inserted into a USB drive, launches a video study of men imposing order on the landscape. The order of the clips is reconfigured each time the…
Moab Video Project Throughout 2008 I organized a video program called Moab Video Project on MAC21, a small cable station broadcasting in a single secluded desert community. Part curatorial project, part intervention/installation, I inserted a different artist’s video into regular programming every week for a year. MAC21 functions as the community information channel, viewed by…
Contemplating a Stream 2007 Performance for live webcast Inspired by Whitman, this performance was broadcast via live web stream. Contemplating a Stream was conceived for PerformaTV, artist Ronnie Bass’s internet-based performance venue created for Performa 07.
Amazonian News Network 2005 video, 5 minutes 45 seconds Amazonian News Network explores the Female Soldier archetype, representing both gender transgression and patriotism in popular media since the 17th century, through the visual language of a 24-hour news channel. Segments, both factual and fictional, magnify a reporting style in which individual narratives overshadow broader sociopolitical…
Female Soldier Ballads 2005 A cappella folk song cycle and screen printed broadsheets Female Soldier Ballads is a cycle of ballads about U.S. military women Lynndie England, Jessica Lynch, Shoshanna Johnson, and Lori Piestewa that I composed and sang. The compositions are printed on decorative lyric sheets that reference 18th century broadsides, the forebearers of…
Lady Presidential Candidates Commemorative Plates 2004 & 2008 Repurposed ceramic plates, hand painted These plates are hand painted with portraits of some of the first women to run for President of the United States, each in a style relevant to the era of her campaign. The collectible plate is a familiar element of presidentiana, the…
Left Mitten and The Great Denudation 2004 Sculpture & performance Fabricated of silicon-coated ripstop nylon, Left Mitten is decked out like a Country and Western performer, replete with fringe, appliqué, and embroidery. Country and Western costuming as a craft was perfected by Nudie’s Rodeo Tailor, among others, to outfit Hollywood’s singing cowboys and Grand Ole…
2003 Monster Tree is a sculpture and performance created in collaboration with Fabienne Lasserre for High Desert Test Sites 2 in Joshua Tree, CA. ” order_by=”sortorder” order_direction=”ASC” returns=”included” maximum_entity_count=”500″]
For High Desert Test Sites 4, I collaborated with artist Fabienne Lasserre on Free Radio HDTS, a low power FM radio station. We compiled over ten hours of audio art, music, and archival material, inspired by high desert geography, which was broadcast during the three-day event held at sites near Joshua Tree, California. Many listeners tuned in as…