about

  • biography

    Kenneth Emig is a transdisciplinary artist exploring intersections of visual art, the body, space, motion, sound, light and technologies. He has won multiple grants from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council and the City of Ottawa for his visual art, performance and dance works.

    Emig's artworks integrate mounted and suspended sculptures and installation, as well as performance in natural and constructed environments. Emig is known for his mesmerizing infinity light boxes with glowing brightly coloured geometry. He has completed three major public art commissions in Ottawa for the University of Ottawa LRT Station, the Adawe Crossing and the Eva James Memorial Community Centre. 

    His work combines the spatial awareness of a dancer, eye of the artist, attention of an acoustic designer with the understanding of materials and methods of industrial research and design enabling him to transcend disciplines to creatively engage problems and solutions.

    Emig has worked for Bell-Northern Research, The National Research Council of Canada, Flextronics, Ryerson University, and Research in Motion. He recently completed the architectural acoustic design of Club SAW, a flexible performance space for intimate audiences.

  • 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