Gast, Christy
Permanent URI for this collection
Digital access to this material is pending artist's approval. Materials may be viewed onsite at the Goldsen Archive, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Kroch Library, Cornell University.
Raised in the rural Midwest, I earned degrees in Sculpture and Women's Studies at The Ohio State University before co-founding a visual arts-based circus in Florida that toured the country three times in two years. I taught K-5 art in a remote comer ofthe Navajo Reservation prior to earning an MFA from Columbia University's Visual Art Division in 2004. Since 1999, my work has been exhibited at PS1 and Artists Space in New York, the Wexner Center in Ohio, LACE in Los Angeles, and Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. I maintain a project-based practice that is inspired by esoteric themes culled from local histories and cultural fringes. I am interested in places where the politics of identity and history intersect on the body or the landscape. Craft and performance traditions are central motivators as I excavate and reconfigure objects and occurrences in material and visual culture. My work imitates and illuminates resourceful tactics for constructing personal and cultural mythologies.