Room for all of it – Katrina Niebergal

Press Release
The Maillardville Cultural Appreciation Society would like to invite you to the closing reception of Katrina Niebergal’s exhibition Room for all of It. Niebergal’s work, while operating closely to it, slyly upsets the everyday–the domestic sphere–embedding it with new narratives, with a considered sense of weight and consequence. The works in the exhibition–sculpture, print, and video–are component parts of the larger installation, a liminal environment.

If I can’t have Aristotle as my teacher
In a lecture, Alan Watts said that philosophy after Wittgenstein had been reduced to nothing more than games of language. Philosophy now appears to be just this, complex words addressing abstract concerns. It is distant if not entirely divorced from the experience of the world. It’s almost forgotten that philosophy by its essence comes from the things and people that surround us, and cannot exist without some relationship, no matter how far, to the banal pieces of everyday life. When we encounter these pieces, which are imbued with a consequence or intention greater than we had expected, we loose for a minute our cynical assumption that the everyday world can no longer make us uncertain. 
When we spoke it was most often about language. About it being misunderstood , about its limitations, about its dominance in all aspects of our lives. This was never angry or resentful, it was only observational. You were more keenly aware, or simply more perceptive of this effect in daily life. I was someone who could twist language to fit institutional frame works and check bureaucratic boxes but was quick to ignore the implications of this out of convenience. We both knew that things not readily placed into categories through words are simultaneously elevated and handicapped, as anything not easily understood will either lead to fascination or rejection. If a thing cannot be transformed by language into, as Wittgenstein called it, a “picture of reality” to be exchanged, it may never have a chance of expanding its legibility to a wider world. Yet despite this, the consequence of these pieces that are for the moment untranslatable persists, perhaps waiting for a new mode of exchange to finally be understood.