We Can All Agree
sound installation music by Nirvana ‘Lithium’ Bikini Kill ‘Feels Blind

source: registrywhitecolumnsorg

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.
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source: centrech

In her artistic practice, Edy Ferguson uses multiple media – sound and video installations, drawing, painting, sculpture, photography and performance – and multiple references drawn from film iconography, rock music and the spirit of punk, especially from the years 1960–1970. Each work combines an array of references which converge and interreact in the exhibition to weave nothing less than a web of values and meanings. The exhibition is conceived as a single and articulated “Gesamtkunstwerk”, featuring the artist’s vision in its full complexity, with all of its stratifications.

By referencing “rich” and “poor” cultures, Edy Ferguson questions our emotional responses to artistic creation, the liberating power of images and music, and the way in which our different takes on reality contradict each other.

The curatorial criterion for this show – of which a first version was presented at the Benaki Museum at the beginning of the summer (“Selected Works 1993 – Present”, June 1st to July 29th, 2012) – lies in the belief that Ferguson has anticipated a number of issues that happen to be at the core of the current artistic debate.
The artist is interested in particular in the real, participative presence of the art work: how can the uselessness of a dead product on a market that carries on regardless be avoided? how can an art work come to life and occupy the space of reality? Edy Ferguson was born in the United States. She lives and works in New York, London and Athens.

After studying painting and sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis, she moved to New York where she worked in film and made video clips. Subsequently, she studied for a master’s at Hunter College (Film and video installation, painting). She has exhibited in New York and San Francisco, and in Venezuela, France and Austria. She has also recently exhibited at the Benaki Museum and the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens. The many prizes and grants she has received include awards from such leading contemporary art institutions as PS1 in New York, and an MTV Music Award for the video clip of the song “Jeremy” by the group Pearl Jam in 1993.