What does it mean to be productive? How is it measured? Is a pregnant person, someone who naps, has brain fog, and a small human inside, considered productive? Is internal reflection with no clear agenda productive? When and how is visual craft productive?
The works in this exhibition are concerned with productivity as framed by convenience, ambition, and literal production. The sculptures are posed as useful appliances with visible mechanisms and moving parts, though they are practically useless and their effects—whether actual or potential—are nonsensical. The drawings are made on top of architectural plans for large warehouses, strip malls, and hotels. The diagrammatic nature of the plans is a foundation for extemporized instructions, which obliquely explain how to operate specific sculptures or graph states of mind. In these works, information for the planning and construction of buildings is obscured in order to be reimagined.
The work in this exhibition is part of a larger body; other selections were recently exhibited at Patient Info Gallery in Chicago.
Raised in New York City, the child of architects who built private homes, Alana Ferguson grew up with a keen awareness of the ways design can convey class and status. Her work critiques the connections between visual aesthetic, class and notions of productivity with clumsiness and humor.