Gerald Ferguson: 100,000 Grapes

From the Dalhousie Art Gallery Permanent Collection

The ten canvasses that make up 100,000 Grapes are part of Gerald Ferguson’s 1997 monumental work 1,000,000 Grapes. First exhibited that same year at the Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery, the work in its entirety consists of one hundred 122 cm square canvasses. Describing the process, Ferguson wrote "1,000,000 Grapes has its antecedent in stenciled Folk art compositions known as Theorem Paintings, to which my Still Life (1989) paintings refer. The ‘grapes’, somewhat like the ‘period’ used in [my] 1969 paintings, are a simple motif which allowed me to duplicate the hyperbolic use of ‘one million’ realized in 1,000,000 Pennies (1979)… I repeatedly passed a modular stencil of forty grapes over the surface of a 48-by-48-inch canvas until it held 10,000 grapes…."

Creating subtle and highly modulated edge-to-edge fields of layered paint, and riffing on the image of grapes in Western still life paintings, Ferguson’s industrious process purposefully removes the craft-based, painterly hand of the artist and replaces it with factory-like production values in which beauty, if evident in the eye of the beholder, is an unintended by-product. 

Ferguson generously donated ten of the one hundred canvasses to the Dalhousie Art Gallery in 2007. This installation, playfully responding to the nature/culture conundrums surrounding food production and consumption as witnessed in Benner’s and McKeough’s exhibitions, marks the debut at the Dalhousie Art Gallery of its 100,000 Grapes.