Maxwell Colette Gallery is proud to present Mass Contemplation, featuring new work from Chicago-based illustrator Ian “Hydeon” Ferguson. This will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery.
Ian Ferguson’s work blends street art, fine art, and graphic design into surreal contemporary Americana, full of metaphor, and designed to intrigue and provoke. Reacting to a world he perceives as being “dominated by the exploitation of oversized lifestyles”, Ferguson presents images of a minimized, streamlined existence. It is a wooded world filled with tiny houses, pointy boots, hobo shacks and mountains where life is reduced to reduced to the most rudimentary functions. The populace of this land are 'herms'; hermaphroditic hermits with strange facial irregularities and a love of French press coffee makers. Ferguson portrays the herms engaged in activities sometimes banal and familiar and other times threateningly peculiar. Ian Ferguson's highly-refined, contemporary design aesthetic is softened by a nostalgia for a simpler, pre-technologic lifestyle that came intertwined with a profound spiritual connection to nature.
Mass Contemplation will showcase Ferguson’s new india ink drawings on paper juxtaposed with paintings on canvas. It will also present a site specific installation titled ‘Terra Firma Shelter’, which will re-create one of his tiny shelters and cover the gallery walls with hand painted murals creating a completely immersive visual experience. Ferguson says “the simple and compact design of the shelter structure is meant to embody the ethos of minimal imprint living or the act of simplifying one’s means of basic survival... [The Installation] is to be visually received like a ship in a bottle absorbed by an old west ghost town.”