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Contemporary Art Gallery

555 Nelson Street
Vancouver, Canada
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ArchiveExhibition
11 Oct 19until5 Jul 20

Ingrid Koenig

Navigating the Uncertainty Principle

CAG Façade and offsite at Yaletown-Roundhouse Station

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.

Ingrid Koenig, Chain Reaction, 2007. Courtesy the artist.

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.