Catherine Ferguson-Installation Artist

Produced by Joel Geyer, Nebraska ETV Cultural Affairs
Adapted from the documentary Is It Art?

Joslyn Art Museum Director Graham Beal and Curator Janet Farber visit the old Warner Auto Shop in Omaha, now the studio of installation artist, Catherine Ferguson. Since most installation art is installed and then removed, one of the few ways they can evaluate Ferguson's art is by viewing slides of previous work.
[Catherine:] "I don't remember if I showed you slides of these the last time we were together or not."
[Graham:] "Catherine Ferguson is working in an area that has been of great significance since the sixties. The art that you see is not something plopped on the floor or hanging on the wall. It's rooms. It's what's around you. The viewer is invited to step inside so there's a sort of a strong psychological quality to it -- the surrealist notion that the work of art is completed in the head of the viewer -- not completed on the easel or in the head of the artist."
[Catherine, explaining a slide of her work:] This piece, "Vermilion Night" is kind of singular in that you don't enter into it at all physically. You sit on the exterior bench and you can see an interior bench and I was hoping that if you sat long enough on the outside bench that you could imagine -- you could kind of mentally project yourself to the interior bench. So the idea was this kind of leap frogging from one bench to the second bench and then out into the starry sky."
    "I found a wonderful Rilke quote that just fits the piece. It says, 'Whoever you are, go out into the evening leaving your room of which you know each bit. Your house is the last before the infinite.' "
[Catherine, with a new slide:] "As you come into the space there was a gauze wall and you could wait there. You could just sit there until -- because it's very dark -- until your eyes adjusted. Then, if you chose, to you could go through a door to the left and go down the path. You approached the center where there's an opening -- where the blue light is so then when you got there you could see that down below was this primitive rock mosaic."
[Graham:] "And you made that?"
[Catherine:] "Yes.For the past few weeks Catherine Ferguson has been working on a new project. It will be called "Lantern." Simple animal shapes which appear in several of her works are actually shapes of Indian effigy mounds discovered along the Missouri River in Iowa and other parts of the country.
[Catherine:] "These mounds were built over 2,000 years ago by the ancestors of the Native Americans. These must have had tremendous significance and power to people who would spend many, many days building these out of Earth. I mean, they're significant alterations of the land. And there's a mystery. There's a story here that there's no ending or beginning. We don't have a lot of information. We just have what's left.
   "By putting the animals in there, I am trying to add an archetypal element to it -- Carl Jung's idea of animals being part of our deepest selves in our dreams, the part that we maybe know the least. Well, as westerners we have a real separation and we have a conflict with nature and are always wanting to be superior to nature and dominate it. I'm more comfortable with a balance with it, but I think it's something we all just have to continue to examine. Way back I think I decided that the farther we get away from nature the more psychotic we're going to be."

[Catherine, walking in the forest:] "I find when I'm here in the forest I can really be in touch with what I truly desire. It helps me sort things out and clarify and get back to what's very essential for me. When you get into the world, and you have heavy scheduling, and activities, and you're bombarded with stuff, and pretty soon you get very distracted, and feel like you're going in a thousand directions. Then you go to the forest, and it's been here for a long, long time. And it reminds you, it opens you up because you're thinking of that expanse of time. I was interested about how our physical space around us can alter us and how we change when we move from one kind of space to another.
   "When I'm in the forest here I'm different than when I am walking down Leavenworth Street where the studio is. That's what I'm interested in exploring in my work, too -- Can I create spaces that change you as you walk into them?" With the help of her son, Adrian, Ferguson sets up a 3/4 size cardboard model of her work in progress.The piece is commissioned by art patron Robert Duncan. This piece is unlike most installation art in that it will be permanently installed on Duncan's estate.
[Catherine:] "Maybe I'd like to try it -- Well, I'll try it down here first, because that was my original plan.
[Greeting Duncan:] Hi."
[Robert:] "How are you?"
[Catherine:] "Good to see you. It looks dinky out here, doesn't it?"
[Robert:] "Well, I wouldn't say dinky. No, I don't think so."
[Catherine:] "That might not be the right spot for it. Well, the other place I was thinking of was sort of over here."
[Robert:] "Yeah, see, I would like this better."
[Catherine:] "Like some of my other pieces, it's a refuge in the landscape. So I'm thinking that just sitting there that you'll think about the animals and our own animal nature"Oh, look -- when you stand here you can look -- it just frames those other pieces. Whoa! Wow, it does for this one, too. In fact, these open areas make wonderful frames for things. They're almost like a view finder."In Duncan's sculpture garden, Ferguson's work is surrounded by many pieces of modern art but she has a clear vision of how her installation work is different.
[Catherine:] "Installation art is more available. It's less elite. And I think we've come from a period when the public's attitude is that art has become far too elite. Only certain people can understand it. Only certain people can see it, and that's in museums. It's walled off. Installation art is at least an attempt to break down that barrier a little bit."
[Catherine, arranging the model:] "The sweep needs to be longer and wrap around more. It needs to be more dynamic in a lot of ways."
[Catherine:] "When you look at a painting or you look at much of sculpture, it's telling you about the artist. I think with installation work, there's a reversal there, and you're not learning so much about the artist as possibly about yourself. It's almost like having a script written but you're the viewer. You're also the actor, and it becomes your scene to develop once you're in there. That's what I'm shooting for in my work.""What more do you want from art than to make you more conscious of yourself and your relationship to others? What more could one ask for? That, in itself, is beautiful."