David Ferguson: It’s a Circus in There

E-mobile in the Hall of Mirrors, photo by the artist

David Ferguson
It’s a Circus in There

January 8 – February 17, 2024
Opening reception: Sunday, January 14, 1 pm
Ottawa School of Art, Orleans Campus Gallery

The exhibition, It’s a Circus in There, is concerned with biases and power, with an evolved Hall of Mirrors and an addition of the Workstation for Reconciliation. 6 mirrors line the sides of a hallway. The e-mobile hangs between those walls with the words for emotions reflected and mirrored. As the viewer moves through the space, the mobile’s coloured leaves will move too, asking us to consider how we think.

The Workstation for Reconciliation includes two tall stools that ask about the comfort of being in this discussion about reconciliation. The broad base of the workstation represents the individuals, that support and design the institutions listed on the column. The issues are visible on the top with the word reconciliation in disorder.

Workstation for Reconciliation, photo by the artist

The installation at the Shenkman Arts Centre has the work presented as stations, with space to approach them separately. These are analogies to the bewildering systems we use, to navigate the physical world and the social worlds we construct.

Tabula Rasa: an empirical view of how we know the world
The Seats of Privilege profiles 8 positions of power and privilege
Us/Them coffee table presents divisions between groups of people
Dartboard of Goals and Dreams demonstrates the relation of chance to intention
Wheel of Fortune has a range of biases to select by chance
Tower of Babel is a monument to information and communication technologies
Timekeepers show time’s constraints on action and process
Coffers of Systems are containers for mental models

Tower of Babel w/ Us/Them coffee table, photo by Toni Hafkensheid

Evolutionary processes are moving toward a human-based process where the culture we build determines what becomes of us, and of associated life.
The better we understand things like cognitive biases, behavioural biases, and social/cultural forces the better we will be able to navigate change.

About the artist:
David Ferguson likes to tell the story of the bird nest he made in kindergarten that was uniquely fashioned and singled out by the teacher. Perhaps that was the beginning of his exploration of novel ways of seeing in photography, furniture, sculpture, and lifestyle.

He learned to hunt and fish as a child along the shores of Lake Superior. An appreciation for areas with minimal human presence and for the range of other life forms began there. He still claims to need more than an occasional respite from human interactions.

After earning a BAA in Media Studies from Ryerson, David Ferguson exhibited photography in Canadian public art galleries. It was still life or tableau photography, large format, colour work. Concurrently he worked as an award-winning art installer in Toronto galleries. When building his off-grid home near Bancroft he became involved in the administration of the Art Gallery of Bancroft, and a participant in the Bancroft and Area Studio tour. The studio tour work was refined rustic furnishings and text components soon appeared in it.

Reading about cognitive and behavioural biases led him to put those ideas into his woodworking. He uses symbols and text as well as structural forms to do this. His installation work combines fine woodworking and word art.

David lives off-grid, growing and harvesting some of his own food, fuel, and lumber. He helps with food banks and nonprofits in his neighbourhood and has board positions with the Art Gallery of Bancroft and with Harvest Hastings, (a county-wide, non-profit helping producers from the land). The inequities of lived experience and of food security, tangled up with the challenges of the changing environment and with socio/political/economic structures, are concerns. Those issues and his curiosity about biases, lightly seasoned with humour and optimism, are evident in David’s work. “With more awareness we will better understand manipulations by vested interests but we can also use that knowledge to implement positive social change.”