about

  • biography

    Kenneth Emig is a transdisciplinary artist in the Ottawa area who explores the confluence of sound, light, space, technology and movement. The best-known artworks from this unique artist and acoustic consultant include architectural light boxes, producing a magical slice of infinity, and stainless steel spheres in unexpected places reflecting panoramas of the surrounding environment. Emig has exhibited widely in Canada and abroad, including the Moscow Biennale, and has won public art commissions in the national capital region.

    Emig’s art practice runs parallel to years of experience in acoustic design, high technology and manufacturing, both in the private sector and academia, involving such outfits as Bell-Northern Research and Ryerson University’s RE/Lab. Additionally, Emig operates his own consulting business, Emig Acoustics, and is a professional dancer.

     

     

  • artist statement

    FINAL GROUP3-Kenneth Emig

    My work is often called sculpture, but I see it as sculptural in only the most generic, spatial sense. I approach my dance performance, light work, installations or physical pieces built from found technology from a position of physicality – how we, as physical beings, relate to the space around us and the objects within it which change and challenge our experiences of our surroundings as we move among them.

    As a painting hung on a gallery wall is an installation, it can never be divorced from the context of its exhibition, and it is changed in both existence and perception by its environment and in relation to observers sharing that space.

    I explore perceptions, senses and environment, influenced by the spatial understanding of a dancer, the sensorial understanding of an acoustician, and the process, methods and materials of high tech research and design.

     

    the video is a 2019 class project for Izabel Barsive, Department of Communications, University of Ottawa

    by Aretha Kalonji, Camille Boily-Lavoie, Emile Stephens, Louis Xu