ELISE FERGUSON
SEQUENCE

EXHIBITION DATES:
JANUARY 22 - MARCH 12, 2022

Romer Young Gallery is pleased to announce its fifth solo exhibition with New York artist Elise Ferguson, Sequence. Using pattern and color, along with a range of process-driven approaches and modern materials, Ferguson creates works based on mathematical puzzles and geometric variations that land somewhere at the intersection of painting, sculpture and printmaking. The results are beautiful works that reflect the artist's intuitive use of geometry.

Elise Ferguson grew up surrounded by color theory, design history and international traditions in architecture. Her mother was a clothing designer, and her stepfather was an architect. Early introduction to textiles, patterns, construction, modernism, profoundly inspired and shaped Ferguson’s visual thinking.

Sequence - the following of one thing after another; a continuous or connected series; a melodic or harmonic pattern repeated at different pitches - consists of a series of paintings. Related yet independent, the works in the exhibition form something like a string of sentences or musical score - where disparate elements play a role in creating meaning together. Lucy Lippard noted that ‘energy is buried in the neutral form and activated by the idea.’ Buried in Ferguson’s work, in her prescriptions, is a sense of possibilities of the transformational. Her simple, modular forms offer a structure through which precise, serial variations can be endlessly played out, acting as a generative matrix. Variations in line, ratio, thickness, patterns, and formulas create the permutations that activate each modular form, transforming it from neutral to kinetic.

The grid of black and white paintings offers possibilities for seemingly endless permutations and serial variation. As with ostinato in music, a continually repeated musical phrase or rhythm, Ferguson adopts a singular image, and alters it slightly to fit a changing harmony; stop, start, stutter, repeat. The black lines wander between thick and thin, creating meaning much like the way staccato and legato offer musical articulation. The negative space and the continuous yellow line, woven throughout, pull the eye through the sequence, through the logical arrangement of abstract images. While the insistence on the repeated form holds the overall tone and character of the work, the varied patterns can be considered “the playground in which the work grows strong and self-confident.” (Edward E Lewinsky). Conversely, Crocus introduces a finite, looping sequence, using the color wheel and its gradients as design. The sequence of works travels along the left wall and makes its way through the gallery, offering an interpretation, via abstraction, of the flexible nature of perception. Pattern and color are communicators, each one exploring a different rhythm, vibration, and temperature. 

ELISE FERGUSON ( b.1964 Richmond, VA) earned her MFA from The University of Illinois, Chicago in 1995, and her BFA from The School of Art Institute of Chicago in 1988. Her work has been exhibited extensively nationally and internationally, with recent solo exhibitions at Romer Young Gallery, 57W57 Arts, Halsey Mckay, and Barton College Art Galleries, amongst others. Selected group exhibitions include Massey Klein, Illinois State University, Able Baker Contemporary, Dieu Donné Papermill and Johannes Vogt Gallery, amongst others. Awards and Residencies include the 2018 Dieu Donne Paper Variables Artist, the 2014 Northern Trust Purchase Prize - Expo Chicago, Artist-in-Residence: Illinois State University, SIU-Carbondale, University Museum: Merit Award, MacDowell Colony and the Socrates Sculpture Park Residency. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artforum, The Wall Street Journal, Contemporary Magazine, Interior Design, Art on Paper, Modern Painters and Art News, amongst others.

For additional information, please contact the gallery at 415.550.7483 or email info@romeryounggallery.com.

EXHIBITION IMAGES: