1995 – 2011
Excerpt from David Wagner’s Essay, Still Life(s) with Adjectives, Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 1997
Angela Inglis’s works explore the qualities of ideas through reference to the physical record of their existence. Information – in formats such as phone books, newspapers, photocopied images and handwritten notes – is the raw material from which the artist builds her works. The source of this information, the human perspicacity for organizing ideas into forms that we can hold or see, is the subject of the work. By making our ideas physical, we render them malleable. They can thus be moved around, put away, put next to one another or put under different lights. Under Inglis’ control, ideas are cut apart into pieces of data and reorganized into something new. The final results are like memorial artifacts of the original materials. They stand in mute testimony to the ideas the represent and, like relics contained in cathedrals, possess some of the substance of what they once were but no longer serve all of their original functions.
