Christy Gast’s work stems from extensive research and site visits to places she thinks of as “contested landscapes”. These range from beaver-ravaged sub-Antarctic forests, to a mountain in Phoenix undergoing a politicized name change, to the extensively engineered canals and dikes around Lake Okeechobee that divert water from the Everglades. She is interested in places where there is evidence of conflict in human desires. She traces, translates or mirrors those conflicts through her art practice.
Gast’s work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally, including MoMA/P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Artist’s Space, and Harris Lieberman Gallery in New York; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions and High Desert Test Sites in California; Gallery Diet, Miami Art Museum and the Bass Museum of Art in Miami; Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich; and Centro Cultural Matucana 100 in Santiago, Chile. Since 2010 she has directed the Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) program, bringing artists to live and work in the Everglades for a month at a time.
This lecture is sponsored by the printmaking area in the Department of Art.