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.

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. 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.