Baby Blue
2020
PLA plastic, UV resin, and rayon flocking
H 12” x L 48” x D 48”
(display format variable)
In 2020 Ferguson was invited by curator Andrew Thompson (Andy T) to participate in The Indexical Print, a multimedia group exhibition with a focus on replication and reproduction.
Baby Blue (2020), revisits Ferguson’s The Nature of Being project (2016) and presents a second full-scale complete replica of the artist’s skeletal system generated from MRI, CT, CBCT, and EOS medical scans. This version of the memento mori was flocked with baby blue rayon fibers, effectively connecting birth to death. Unlike The Nature of Being, Baby Blue is presented on a custom pedestal following exhumation processing guidelines.
Curatorial Statement by Andy T (paraphrased)
Notes on the Index was Rosalind Krauss's attempt to corral some of the divergent, pluralistic themes in contemporary art of the late 1970’s under some unifying identifier: the index. Indexical art was defined as artworks whose physical and aesthetic manifestation was correlated and contingent upon specific conditions of the work’s subject matter or, as more broadly described, 'the referent' of the work. Artistic decisions like scale, shape, composition, color, etc became less about the artist’s assertion of their individual vision or agency and became more about finding meaning externally. Decision making was often deferred to forces that corresponded with physical or cultural conditions outside the artwork, that were more specifically indexed to the physical & contextual conditions of the referent. Included within this is the economic evaluation of the artwork and the potential for signification through the meaning of money as correlated to value systems outside of the traditional art market.
-Andrew Thompson
“...pronouns announce themselves as belonging to a different type of sign: the kind that is termed the index. As distinct from symbols, indexes establish their meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to their referents. They are the marks or traces of a particular cause, and that cause is the thing to which they refer, the object they signify. Into the category of the index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents of the shifters. Cast shadows could also serve as the indexical signs of objects…”
(Krauss, Rosalind, “Notes on the Index part 1” , October, Vol. 3 [Spring, 1977], pg. 70)