Provenance

Robert Rogers, Halifax

Gerald Ferguson was born Cincinnati in 1937 and died in Halifax in 2009. Ferguson moved to Halifax in 1968 at the invitation of Garry Kennedy to teach at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, where he remained until 2006. Together they transformed NSCAD into an internationally recognized art college. A rigorous and influential teacher, Ferguson founded key programs including the Lithography Workshop, NSCAD Press, the Visiting Artists series, and the New York Loft.

Ferguson’s practice critically examined the conventions of art through task-oriented works using utilitarian materials, contributing significantly to minimal, process, and conceptual art. His work was included in MoMA’s landmark 1970 exhibition Information and exhibited widely in Canada and internationally. A dedicated collector of folk art, he donated the Gerald Ferguson Collection of Nova Scotian Folk Art to the Canadian Museum of Civilization in 1985 and received the Canada Council Molson Prize in 1995.

Length 4 is made up entirely of text printed in regular columns. The title Length 4 is a reference to the fact that all the words are English four-letter words. Some are crossed out, not because they are wrong, but because there are (deliberate) errors in the printing. Of course, a ‘four-letter word’ is also a swear word. Ferguson’s work here satirises the idea that some words can be arbitrarily considered bad, inelegant, or inappropriate in some contexts. This print is part of a series, a bookwork, a ‘dictionary’ arranged by word-length, which questions the ways in which we use and classify our language. And since we define and describe our world through language, these questions are extended to wider issues of division and classification, political and social.