Hannah Ferguson
About the Artist
Hannah Ferguson is an emerging artist and writer in Tiohtiá:ke/Mooniyang/Montreal. She holds a BFA from Concordia University in Art History and Studio Art, with a minor in Film Studies (2022). Her practice and research roves through fibre arts, print media, and sometimes sound to explore spatial and material histories, methods of collection/preservation, (mis)communications, and hauntings. Most recently, she has participated in residencies at Concordia’s Fine Arts Reading Room (2022), the Icelandic Textile Center (2022), and Cyber Love Hotel / Things+Time (2023).
end of programming day, by Hannah Ferguson
About the Project
end of programming day is a dismantling and reconstituting of the “sign-off” announcements broadcast every night on CBC to signal the end of the programming day, a transition from broadcasting to “dead air.” These segments listed the different regions that picked up the broadcast, as well as a montage of Canadian imagery, culminating with the national anthem.
This work in progress investigates how the mid-century project of attempting to articulate a consolidated “Canadian” national identity became disseminated through these rather mundane televisual conventions. end of programming day is preoccupied with the hauntedness at the root of this colonial project, and how these hauntings became indexically embedded in cultural artifacts that themselves have now fallen out of circulation.
The repetitive nature of the sign off segment, in which it is broadcast over and over, late in the night (half-asleep), and the subsequent clearing of the airways (silence) renders it an uncanny televisual object. Its materiality becomes visible only in its decay, captured imperfectly on VHS and reanimated in digital video formats. In this work, remanence decay is recast as woven newsprint. Material translation and distanciation--scanning, printing, cutting, weaving, imperfectly encasing in water drawn from Lake Ontario--further make strange the recorded announcement. end of programming day arrests transmission, present and absent, as the night stretches ahead.
