Exhibitions

LINDA KING FERGUSON: THE WAITING ROOM

Channel to Channel / 507 Hagan Street, Nashville , TN March 4, 2021 - March 31, 2021

Linda King Ferguson

King Ferguson says she thinks of the Equivalence Series, a project that has continued for nearly six years, as a collective of social bodies. They both remember a position and locate a place, making the painted social body a site of occurrence. As a site, they articulate the abstracted and formal operative and associative language of relationship; relationships that proposition viewers’ perception through what is and what is not, directing their view to the greater social context. The work is sourced from the abstracted feminine body.

She says of her work, “I’m committed to their object-ness by cutting them open and exposing sections of their underside, revealing the social space of the architecture they are reliant on yet autonomous from.  Almost all of the works in this exhibition were made during the pandemic and over this past year with the tensions of isolation that hampers and strains our social relationships. These conditions give a very specific context to making and art production in this time. I couldn’t help but focus on empirical geometry.  A geometry that is a dynamic of the forms (architecture) we inhabit and which organizes our phenomenological experience of spatial distance.” 

Through a feminist lens, the Equivalence Series sources hues from lipstick and nail polish sample charts. Linen, both raw and painted, is like the haptic texture of skin. Form generates from nature’s geometric principles, and felt gestures become the curl and curve of opened flapped forms. Lines as edges traverse smooth surfaces, defining protective outside layers and exposing interior vulnerable absences. These careful and stilled material glimpses signify a reflexive meaning. An artist’s studio is not unlike a Waiting Room; A place between of careful measures, uncertainties and anticipation.

Our current conditions require us to shelter in place, making our homes perpetual waiting rooms as we rely on the intimate distance of our devices to communicate and connect. In isolation, it’s these threads of connection that assure us of our humanity while we practice the acts of being and making through emotive gestures. We must plan and work, and heal and hope through a shared empathy while change is being made.