Rib Space

RIB SPACE is a collaboration between Emory Hall and Chris Johst that uses the visual and social language of American BBQ culture to explore masculinity, competition, ritual, and speculative ideas around the future of food. The exhibition brings together real and AI-generated images of BBQ contests, edible ribs presented on stainless-steel serving sculptures, printed works, and 3D-printed trophies that borrow from the aesthetics of competitive grilling and Americana.

Hall’s practice moves between food, metalsmithing, sculpture, and installation, often imagining how food and its built environments might evolve. For the opening, she prepared Kansas City-style baby back ribs using a family recipe passed down by her pitmaster father, connecting the project to her upbringing in Kansas City and to her family’s long-running backyard BBQ competition, Holy Smokes. Johst works across digital and physical media, drawing on the visual culture of Americana and the performance of masculinity. His trophies function as what he describes as “worldbuilding objects,” extending the logic of competition into a speculative space.

The project originated with Hall’s proposal for a performative BBQ competition inspired by Holy Smokes. At Rip Space, it developed as an in-process experiment in food, performance, sculpture, image-making, and AI, using the backyard BBQ as both a sensory environment and a cultural form. Rather than presenting the idea as resolved, RIB SPACE served as an initial iteration toward a larger-scale performance, testing how inherited ritual, technological mediation, and hypermasculine spectacle might collide within a single social space.