Christy Gast: Cruising // the stacks, with the artist’s selection of works by Constanza Alarcón Tennen, Paloma Barhaugh-Bordas, Rachel Owens, agustine zegers, and Charlap Hyman & Herrero
September 4th – November 15th, 2025
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, 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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’ “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. 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. Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s glowing shell lamps provide the perfect light for whispering in the stacks.
Cruising // the stacks will be on view in the Exhibition Library through November 15th, 2025.
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 art practice—which expands from print media into installation, as well as social and collaborative practices—works at the intersection of migration, queerness, and ecology. While thinking-through-making, Barhaugh-Bordas asks how art can contribute to ecological knowledge and build interspecies understanding, an inquiry they began investigating by comparing the stories of naturalization—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, Buffalo Artists Studios, and Sediment Arts. Artist residencies include Casa Lu Mexico City, ACRE, Women’s Studio Workshop, the Institute for Electronic Arts at Alfred University, MI-Lab in Japan, and Kala Art Institute.
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
Owens’ works incorporate environmental issues, consumption of the natural world, and the social conditions that harbour them. Working sculpturally, performatively, and socially, she uses material as meaning: what the sculpture is made of—is what the sculpture means—is what the sculpture does. Bottle shards, cardboard, coal, cut up humvees, and the dust of marble are all used to convey meaning, emotion, and action as they take on forms from porch to ancient tree often linking disparate objects and spaces across time. In her recent project Future Fossils, she tells a deep geological story showing the connection between ancient trees and ourselves. Casting the fossilized remains from what is considered the world’s oldest known forest (400M years old), the works refer to stained glass taking on a celestial glow elevating the rocks to their important status as our plant ancestors.
Owens has been included in exhibitions both in the US and internationally including The X Krasnoyarsk Biennial, RU; Franco Soffiantino Contemporary, IT; Austrian Cultural Forum, NY; The Frist Museum, TN; Socrates Sculpture Park, NYC; and the New Museum Window, NYC among others. Her solo museum project, The Hypogean Tip commissioned for The Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport CT subsequently traveled to The Sugarhill Museum in NYC. She has had reviews and inclusion in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, Flash Art and Triple Canopy Anthology and she has received grants from the Joan Mitchell, Pollack 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 US and abroad, among them; The Beth Rudin Dewoody Collection and The Bunker, The Pritzker Family, Berkshire Botanical Garden, Housatonic Museum of Art, Sprint Collection, Fidelity Collection, and Donald Mullin JR.
Owens is Professor of Art & Design and Chair of the Sculpture Department at SUNY Purchase College. She lives and works in Amenia, NY.
About Constanza Alarcón Tennen
Constanza Alarcón Tennen (b. Santiago, 1986) is an artist from Chile working at the intersection of sound, sculpture, video, and performance. She is interested in transmaterial dialogues as ways of inhabiting an in-between space of materials and objects. In recent years, she has focused her practice in an integrated view on fiction and the possibilities of eroticism, and haptics, as lenses through which to see the world of both human and non-human entities.
She graduated from a BFA at Universidad Católica de Chile and the MFA in Sculpture at Yale University in 2015. Her work has been shown internationally at venues such as PS122 (NY), Patricia Ready Gallery (Santiago), The XIII New Media Biennial (Chile), Künstlerforum Bonn (Bonn), Atelierhaus Salzamt (Linz), the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, among others. She has participated in residencies such as The Vermont Studio Center (VT), Delfina Foundation (London), and B.A.S.E Tsonami (Valparaíso).
She not-so-recently published her first poetry compilation as an artist’s book with Otra Sinceridad independent press.
Besides her artistic practice, Constanza is 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, Prairie, Center for Performance Research, and Sharjah Art Foundation. They currently live on the traditional homelands of the Council of the Three Fires: The Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations, colonially known as Chicago, IL.
