She Is Trying to Disappear

source: faggionato

Born in Chicago, Ferguson lives and works in New York. In 1988 she received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, even though her professors had stopped speaking to her, being the first student there to ever show video installation. In 1996 she received her Master’s in Painting and Combined Media from Hunter College, New York, being the first student there to show music installation, 5 in the same space, creating quite a cacophony. She has exhibited internationally in France, Switzerland, Austria, Venezuela, Greece and across the USA. Solo exhibitions in 2012 include a retrospective at the Centre d’Arte Contemporain in Geneva and the Benaki Museum in Athens. Her work was also included in the 2nd Biennale of Mardin, Turkey, the Weiner Art Foundation and the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens.
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source: registrywhitecolumns

Edy Ferguson was born in Chicago, where she enrolled in the Early College Program at the Art Institute during High School. For her BFA at Washington University in St. Louis, she split her studies between sculpture and painting. Instead of attending graduate school on a paid scholarship, she then moved to New York to work as an unpaid intern for an underground contemporary dance tv show and eventually art directed hip hop music videos in the late 80s early 90s. She worked in film for five years, and won a MTV best music video award in 1993 for Jeremy, by Pearl Jam. Immediately afterwards, she enrolled in an MFA combined media program at Hunter College.
During college and for some years afterwards, she worked freelance in various galleries and museums in New York, and this provided her with a rich, practical education in art history that allowed her to expand on her studies at Hunter College.

Travel was an important part of Ferguson’s art making practice from 1993–1994, when she lived briefly in Los Angeles, and for some years after 2007, when she lived in Vienna and participated in numerous travel residencies in Austria and Greece.

Ferguson’s comprehensive installation articulates different areas of energy in her oeuvre. The exhibition presents a multi-layered view of her work using various techniques–drawing, installation, performance, video, and painting– in the form of a Gesamkunstwerk, or ‘Total Artwork’.

The curatorial criterion for this show is the belief that Ferguson has anticipated a number of issues that are at the core of the current artistic debate. The scope of her skills, her freedom to employ a wide array of media, as well as her stance towards performance, make for a body of work that is challenging, creative, all inclusive and engaging. Rather than the contemplation of individual works, this show proposes to feature the artist’s vision in its full complexity, with all its stratifications, emotional sensitivity, and infectious energy.

Through allusions to ‘high’ and to ‘low’ culture–often resorting to icons from cinema or the world of rock music–Ferguson poses pertinent and poignant questions on the role of emotions in artistic creations, on the freeing power of images and music, and on the coexistence of multiple and contradictory points of view in our experience of reality.

Ferguson has exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Venezuela, France, and Austria. More recently she was included in the exhibition Faces at the Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens, The Benaki Museum, Athens, The 2nd Bienale of Mardin, Turkey, and a retrospective at the Centre d’Arte Contemporain in Geneva Switzerland.