En Salle // Indoor Landscape

While the French term en plein air refers to painting outdoors within the landscape, en salle means “indoors” or “in the room,” speaking to Ferguson’s interest in interior spaces, faux surfaces, and the mimicry of biological forms. Playing with this reversal of art historical terminology, the works in the show are ostensibly ex situ: made and existing outside their natural locations of reference. These objects and materials are largely devoid of any true connection to the land, and aptly exhibit the strange futility of capitalist desires to manufacture nature.

The sculptural centerpiece of the exhibition, above below beyond, was created for an exhibition at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in 2020, which remained largely unviewable due to COVID-19 restrictions. Here the work is reconsidered and expanded in the context of the Leighton Art Centre with the companion work paper sky. This context considers the founders Barbara and A.C. Leighton, whose work was centered on depictions of the land and sky and the practice of plein air painting, a tradition that the Centre carries on in its current programming and collection. Ferguson has created her own version of a landscape through sourcing ready-made objects with pre-packaged nature veneers; carpet made to look like a painterly field of flowers, paper printed to imitate a blue, cloud-filled sky. The materials have been cut to physically open them into net-like forms, allowing natural light from the windows to pass through. Following the logic of the material is key; Ferguson cuts away parts of the floral carpet pattern, following the lines of the pattern itself. This allows the once-solid carpet to open itself to the light, which in turn casts shadows as replacements for the shapes that have been removed. In paper sky, that same carpet pattern is projected onto and cut out of the material as a means of connection between these two spatially separate entities (land and sky).

En Salle // Indoor Landscape acknowledges and complicates our reverence for nature, joining the worlds of “real” and “fake”. As natural light passes over and through the objects, their static surface is activated. Like painting en plein air, the work captures qualities of light and atmosphere, but here there is a disconnect when determining a sense of place; the result is entirely manufactured.