Ingrid Koenig

In this exciting conversation, art and physics converge as Ingrid Koenig, currently Artist-in-Residence at [TRIUMF,](https://www.triumf.ca/) Canada’s particle accelerator centre, speaks with TRIUMF laboratory scientist and Deputy Department Head, David Morrissey, and postdoctoral research fellow, Djuna Croon, on the intersections of scientific and artistic thought.

### Biographies

Ingrid Koenig is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Goethe Institute, as well as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the project *Leaning Out of Windows—Art and Physics Collaborations Through Aesthetic Transformations* (2016-2020), co-awarded with artist collaborator Randy Lee Cutler. Koenig has exhibited her drawings and paintings in public galleries across Canada, Europe and New Zealand. In 2019 she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant to join the Arctic Circle Art & Science Residency in the international territory of Svalbard. Koenig earned her MFA at NSCAD, Halifax. Based in Vancouver, she is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.

Djuna Croon is a researcher in theoretical particle physics, astro-particle physics and cosmology. She has worked on cosmic inflation, extended Higgs sectors, boson starts, phase transitions, and, most recently, gravitational waves. Croon is also an enthusiastic science communicator, committed to making academia more inclusive. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at TRIUMF in Vancouver, and sketches and paints in her spare time.

David Morrissey is a research scientist at TRIUMF and an adjunct professor at the University of Victoria. His research focuses on the Standard Model of elementary particles and the search for new phenomena beyond it. A central goal of his work is to try to understand what dark matter might be and how it could be tested directly in the laboratory or indirectly through astronomical observations. The puzzling excess of ordinary matter over antimatter is a second focus for Morrissey, and he investigates how this asymmetry may have been created in the very early universe. He also studies the newly discovered Higgs boson and the origin of its curiously small mass.

### Accessibility

This event will take place in the Roundhouse Multimedia Room on the 2nd floor which is accessible by elevator.


A graphite drawing depicting an imaginary machine with a black tube-like shape attached on top of a box. 

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Ingrid Koenig in conversation with Djuna Croon and David Morrissey

Talk

Ingrid Koenig’s practice encompasses the fields of theoretical physics, philosophies of knowledge and social history. Her work considers the possibilities of how knowledge can be translated across different disciplines so that we might more imaginatively negotiate our everyday existence in the contemporary world. *Navigating the Uncertainty Principle* presents enlarged vinyl versions of graphite drawings developed out of the artist’s long-time interest in the visual diagrams that scientists use to describe the complex phenomena of physics, from chain reactions to black holes. In each work, Koenig quite literally entangles this mode of communication with iconography of domestic life — the everyday activities of cooking, refrigerating, repairing and washing up. In this way, she charts the interconnected currents and chaos of everyday existence, and proposes a means of visualizing those abstract laws that bind our most intimate and banal movements physically — and, as Koenig would argue, poetically — to the rest of the universe. 

Curated by Kimberly Phillips with assistance from Julia Lamare


### Biography 

Ingrid Koenig is the recipient of grants from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Goethe Institute, as well as the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) for the project *Leaning Out of Windows — Art and Physics Collaborations Through Aesthetic Transformations* (2016-2020), co-awarded with artist collaborator Randy Lee Cutler. Koenig has exhibited her drawings and paintings in public galleries across Canada, Europe and New Zealand. In 2019 she was awarded a Canada Council for the Arts grant to join the Arctic Circle Art & Science Residency in the international territory of Svalbard. Koenig earned her MFA at NSCAD, Halifax. Based in Vancouver, she is an Associate Professor at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.



ProgramGuideFall2019.pdf

ExhibitionGuideIngridKoenig.pdf

A graphite drawing depicting black circles and arrows which form a loose, pyramid-like stack expanding down from the top on a plain white background. 

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Exterior image of CAG with the work of Ingrid Koeing installed on the ground floor facade windows. Six windows display six, large-scale vinyl prints of back and white graphite drawings. 

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Image of two vinyl prints of black & white graphite drawings in two windows. The left has dynamic swirls of arrows and circles and the right has a stack of plates converging with a cloud-like shape.  

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Exterior image of CAG with the work of Ingrid Koeing installed on the ground floor facade windows. Eight windows display eight, large-scale vinyl prints of back and white graphite drawings. 

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Image of Yaletown-Roundhouse Station facade with a vinyl print of a large-scale, graphite drawing affixed to its exterior; black circles form a loose, pyramid-like stack expanding down from the top. 

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Navigating the Uncertainty Principle

Ingrid Koenig
Black Hole, 2007
Archival inkjet print on legacy fibre paper
Edition of 15
5.75 x 7.5 inches
Unframed

Ingrid Koenig’s artistic practice traverses the fields of theoretical physics, social history and philosophies of knowledge. In its broadest sense, her work considers the possibilities of how knowledge can be translated across different disciplinary communities so that we might more imaginatively negotiate our everyday existence in the contemporary world. *Black Hole* was commissioned on the occasion of Koenig’s solo exhibition *Navigating the Uncertainty Principle*, on view at CAG until April 5, 2020. It was drawn from the same series of drawings that are on view, which were developed out of Koenig’s interest in the visual diagrams scientists use to describe the complex phenomena of physics, such as chain reactions, thermal movement, molecular pressure, spacetime, force fields, electromagnetism and black holes.


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Black Hole, 2007

An interdisciplinary dialogue between art and physics, co-designed and curated by Ingrid Koenig, Margit Schild and Elvira Hufschmid.

Funded by Goethe Satellite @ Vancouver – Goethe-Institut in cooperation with TRIUMF, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and Revised Projects, Vancouver Canada.

Koenig, Schild & Hufschmid were named Artists-in-Residence at TRIUMF (Canada’s National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics) from 2011 – 14. With funding from the Goethe Institute, they launched an arts and science project called RAW DATA. Artistic Transformation – a pilot project for an international venture. In Fall 2012 a physics problem was presented through a six hour workshop to a group of artists from four aesthetic media: sound, body, text and image. Within a three-week timeframe, this first group of artists responded to the formulated science problem through their own discipline. Then through the outcome of a “bird lottery” the artwork was passed on to a second group of artists without revealing the nature of the physics problem. In response to the artwork, after another three weeks, the second group had completed their responsive work. During the exhibition of works and performance, a public workshop was held where physicists interpreted this “artistic data”, some of whom did not know the original physics problem, until it was later revealed. Koenig, Schild and Hufschmid found that this model of collaboration generated a collective, creative field that wove art and physics into a fabric of associations worthy of further investigation.

Artist Participants: Sonnet L’Abbé, Dennis Burke, Randy Lee Cutler, David Khang, Ingrid Koenig, Ben Reeves, Stefan Smulovitz, Suzi Webster.

Physicist Participants: Dr. Anadi Canepa, Dr. Abhishek Kumar, Dr. Ania Kwiatkowski, Dr. Nigel Lockyer, Dr. Kendall Mahn, Dr. Tim Meyer, Dr. Chris Ruiz, Dr. Reda Tafirout.


Ingrid Koenig

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