David Ferguson: what about free will

Installation of the Hall of Mirrors with the Mobile Of Personality Types and Traits in the background

David Ferguson: what about free will
3D Interactive Installation with Artist Presentation and Talk

Exhibition: November 7 – 29, 2025
Artist Talk: November 29, 2pm
Klotzek Gallery, Yarker, ON

David’s fascination with cognitive biases is expanding to include our entire human operating system. It seems hugely complex and a roomful of exhibits is how he wants to approach it.

Spin the Wheel of Fortune; it will point to a bias for you to accept with the same ease you accept an astrology reading.

Find your current personality type in the fluttering leaves of the Mobile of Personality Types and Traits or in the reflections in the Hall of Mirrors (Ok, it’s just a corner this time).

You can try your hand at rolling the dice and consider the result and the text accompanying them.

Have a seat in a Seat of Privilege at the empirical Tabula Rasa or the Us/Them coffee table.

The Hierarchical Bookshelf has some books you can rearrange and rank along the lines of Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs or the ascending chakra symbols. Add your own books if you like.

They have packed the space at Klotzek Gallery with exhibits. Some exhibits are new versions of earlier work and some are new experiments. The paint was still wet.

The Seat of Consciousness from across the gallery

David Ferguson wants to represent the complex ways our operating system develops our behaviours. Text components allow him to approach it literally. The text and symbols bring up references to social structure, cognitive biases and our imprinting by experience, genetic structure, culture and environment.

Wood, a renewable resource, is his canvas. With decades of experience making custom furnishings he has the skills and the resources for finewoodworking.

His intention is to build exhibits that attract attention, offer engagement and then challenge thought patterns or conventions. This exhibition is part of his plan for developing a roomful of interactive 3D exhibits. The exhibits present aspects of the processes that produce our behaviours.

First the work needs to be attractive in design, finish and in craftsmanship. Then they offer engagement with the viewer. Sometimes it is just a response to your presence with a motion sensed activation. It can be an opportunity to interact physically or even imaginatively with an artifact. Physical contact, as in sitting in one of the Seats of Privilege, takes the concepts to a visceral level.

How can we know some action was freely willed without accounting for all the contributions to our present state? Where do we really have agency?

Tabula Rasa and the Seats of Privilege amid related exhibits

About the Artist

David is an environmentalist. He built (largely by himself) a passive solar home in an off grid location to work from. He lives there in a rural area of north Hastings County Ontario.

His artwork, from the photography that was exhibited across Canada, to what he is doing now, has always been concerned with why we do the things we do. We change forests, water sheds, biospheres and populations.

David works with the local food banks, a program that supplies firewood to needy parties, the Art Gallery of Bancroft and sits on the board of a county wide organization (Harvest Hastings) that supports producers from the land.

Culture influences our behaviours. Art changes culture:. His bets are on our cultural evolution for a better world for all life. It is faster than genetic changes and inclusive of politics, science and environment.

Land Acknowledgement

This work was done on traditional Algonquin territory. David was a small part of a Truth and Reconciliation exhibition at the Art Gallery of Bancroft in 2023. The curators of those exhibitions are intent on exhibiting that work more widely. Klotzek Gallery is on traditional lands of the Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabeg nations. We all work respectfully to make life better for all the inhabitants and to protect the land itself.

Klotzek Gallery
2838 County Road 6
Yarker, ON
klotzekstudio.com

Gallery Hours: Call 613-893-5111 for hours
Accessibility: Klotzek Gallery is not accessible

David Ferguson
Bancroft, ON
www.cogitatethis.ca
david@dferguson.ca
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Andrzej Maciejewski is hosting this exhibition in his gallery. Information about his photographic career is here.

David Ferguson wants to share his appreciation for the support of the Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Program for this exhibition. The OAC is an agency of the provincial government. My friends and associates are critical to my continuing this work and I salute them for placing trust in me.

Image Descriptions:
1. David Ferguson is installing the Hall of Mirrors around the Mobile of Personality Types and Traits. The Canadian maple leaves are stencilled with mirrored text on one side. The bookcase for Hierarchy is showing the chakra side. Some details of the Seat of Consciousness are in the foreground.
2. In this view of the installation timepieces are visible, and the entirety of the Seat of Consciousness, with the improbable bike seat on top, but the Us/Them coffee table is to the left and out of the frame as is the Wheel of Fortune. Don’t Think About Art is foregrounded and set to greet visitors to the gallery.
3. This view shows Tabula Rasa accompanied by 6 of the 8 Seats of Privilege and surrounded by motion activated ‘boxes’ for anarchy, superstition, politics and consciousness. The Hierarchical Bookshelf shows the ‘Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs” side and an arrangement of books.