SLAPHAPPY

work by Alana Ferguson

April 5 – 27, 2025

On View Sundays
11 A – 2 P

Opening Reception

Saturday, April 5th
4 – 7 p

Join us in celebration of the opening of Alana Ferguson’s solo exhibition, SLAPHAPPY. 

What does it mean to be productive? How is it measured? Is a pregnant person, someone who naps, has brain fog, and a small human inside, considered productive? Is internal reflection with no clear agenda productive? When and how is visual craft productive?

The works in this exhibition are concerned with productivity as framed by convenience, ambition, and literal production. The sculptures are posed as useful appliances with visible mechanisms and moving parts, though they are practically useless and their effects—whether actual or potential—are nonsensical. The drawings are made on top of architectural plans for large warehouses, strip malls, and hotels. The diagrammatic nature of the plans is a foundation for extemporized instructions, which obliquely explain how to operate specific sculptures or graph states of mind.  In these works, information for the planning and construction of buildings is obscured in order to be reimagined.

The work in this exhibition is part of a larger body; other selections were recently exhibited at Patient Info Gallery in Chicago.

Alana Ferguson is an interdisciplinary artist and educator in Chicago. Raised in New York City and the child of architects who built private homes, she was raised with keen awareness of the ways design conveys class and status. Her work examines connections between femininity, domesticity and consumerism with humor. She received a BFA from Washington University in St. Louis in 2012, an MAT from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2016, and an MFA from University of Chicago in 2021. She has been an educator for over 10 years, teaching in K-12 public schools and university classrooms. She is an adjunct professor at the College of DuPage and a lecturer at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Alongside teaching and making art, she has coordinated artist performances in her front yard, in a project called The Lawn.

@fergalana