POP!NK Editions, Chicago’s premier fine art screenprinting studio, is pleased to unveil “In the Forest All Alone,” a new release from Windy City painter and printmaker Jordan Ferguson.  

“In the Forest All Alone,” Ferguson’s first screenprint produced under the POP!NK banner, simply and succinctly captures the fear of feeling lost — a primal panic response triggered by isolation, disorientation and the oppressive weight of the unknown. 

Ferguson began painting his modern-day memento mori in the bleak midwinter of 2026, following a visit to his native Colorado. “I was feeling pretty stagnant, and thinking dark and gloomy thoughts. I knew I wanted to shift my work in a way that felt more outdoors and landscape-y, and my mind went to growing up — being a young boy in the woods, and how the trees seemed so vast and never-ending,” says Ferguson, who came of age in Woodland Park, a small Rocky Mountains community surrounded by the 1.2 million-acre Pike National Forest. “Getting lost was always a fear of mine. When you’re eight years old, you don't have any grasp of how to get yourself out of that situation if it happens. You can’t help but feel vulnerable.” 

A pile of skulls — the eternal symbol of mass death, ancient ritualistic sacrifice and territorial boundary marking — foregrounds the fate of all who fail to find a way out of the maze. “I wanted to paint something on the forest floor, close to the tree stumps,” Ferguson says. “When I came across the reference image that I used for the skulls, I knew that was the way to convey the fear and the vastness that the woods represent, and how being there makes you realize how small you are as a person.” 

Ferguson, whose work has appeared in group exhibitions at venues including Vertical Gallery in Chicago and Thinkspace Projects in Los Angeles, originally created “In the Forest All Alone” in Adobe Photoshop, fine-tuning the composition and colors onscreen before painting the image on canvas. 

“I started as a painter, then I became a printmaker. When I went back to painting, I wanted to make my paintings feel like my prints, so I just took the process behind printmaking and applied it to painting,” Ferguson explains. “I feel very strongly against the evolution of technology, and how it’s stealing the human hand from every aspect of life. Drawing something in Photoshop, with clear stylistic elements of Photoshop, then taking that digital image and physically painting it, is an act of defiance. I'm gonna make it by hand, because fuck the machines.” 

Ferguson, who doubles as POP!NK’s shop tech and heads the studio’s ink department, teamed with co-founder Zach Schrey to hand-pull all 30 signed and numbered copies of “In the Forest All Alone.” The 20-by-20-inch screenprint features seven spot colors as well as two multi-color split fountain layers. 

“It sounds almost evil to say, but I hope people feel the despair in this print. At the same time, I also like the idea of someone just enjoying the image. There’s something sort of humorous about these goofy Photoshopped drawings that are just a little morbid,” Ferguson says. “And if the viewer just likes skulls, that’s fine, too.”

- Jason Ankeny, @tenaciouslittlemonkey, www.tenaciouslittlemonkey.com