Thursday night is CalArts’ traditional Gallery Night, where openings abound for art shows—and theater, dance, and music performances take over many of the spaces around campus. One of the many highlights this week is Chris Johst’s Western-tinged thesis exhibition Lord, Honey, You’re a Ghost in gallery D301.
From Johst, an MFA 2 candidate in the Art and Technology program:
Lord, Honey, You’re a Ghost probes the cultural forces that established American ideals of bootstrapping, self-sufficiency, and meliorism. The Western frontier, which long served as a space for forging male identities, is exhausted and supplanted by a liminal maker space. Its imagery and mythology (often white, often colonial-oppressive) has been overwhelmingly adapted into entertainment. I work within that mythos to invert and negate its hard male iconography and confront its ideals under the ever-present specter of American masculinity.
To see other happenings at CalArts, please check out our events calendar.
