Wanda Koop at The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, February 18 - May 15, 2011

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Wanda Koop: On The Edge of Experience, recently at The National Gallery of Canada, surveyed the artist’s work from the early 80s to the present, including a room devoted to Koop’s research and studies, and an installation of paintings devoted to her recent collaborative work Hybrid Human. The survey format revealed a shift in Koop’s work from relying on an aura emerging from the empty loop of images out of context, to a focus on some of the unpredictable effects and affects of how technologically oriented perception has changed how we look at images in contemporary daily life.

Koop’s selected early work, including her plywood paintings from the 1980s to her canvas works from the 1990s up to 2004, are large-scale and painted exclusively in acrylic, wherein paint handling operates within an immediate sense of surface. In these early pieces and particularly in Tear (1996) and Helicopter (1986), the large scale emphasizes weaknesses in the medium, magnifying technique to the point where unevenness appears amateur, and virtuosic flourishes appear superficial. Koop has chosen to tackle these limitations of acrylic paint through a shift from an empty illustrational handling of traditional frontal subjects to a devotion to the optics and illusionism of colour. The monumental scale of her work, entirely in keeping with her interest in evoking painting environments, merely maintain that these paintings operate like generic subway billboards within the quiet intimacy of the gallery space.

In a room devoted to staging Koop’s working environment, a tightly organized collection of research (including maquettes of idealized installation spaces) tries very hard to impress, evoking a comical hubris. Surrounded by several smaller works, a large unstretched painting from her 1995 Green Room series surprises with its modest power, suggesting the artist’s rare trust in the subtlety of tones, stains, and acrylic glazes. Here, landscape is interior space. In a finely-textured sky of washes, fluid grey-blues pool and fade, describing a space only possible as paint. A central orange-red orb-eye, reminiscent of ink on glass, tints the surrounding terrain with imperceptible warmth. The ability for this single painting to affect so strongly in the context of an exhibition of such consistent showmanship reveals that Koop’s recognizable tonal fields of paint are more effective when freed from jarring, optical hooks and their vies for viewers’ attention.

In selections from Koop’s Sightlines and later Green Zone work, semi-nocturnal landscapes demarcated by hard-edged shapes of colour resemble Koop’s earlier cherries, hockey masks, and baby faces in that they are all images fetishized and imbued with fixed symbolic roles. She has stated in a recent interview: “I want the effect of my art to be as if I had taken a camera and spun around 360 degrees, so that I take in everything in all directions”. For the most part, Koop’s paintings go out of their way to point to a fixed, vacant immediacy, while their conceptual possibilities remain tied to ideas of the mediated gaze as cold or even violent. Hal Foster’s 1986 description of late-80s painting and its simulated modes of abstraction using “standard design shapes and meticulous representations of quasi-sci-fi devices, structures and signs” could be a direct reading of Wanda Koop’s work during this period.

Her most recent work in Hybrid Human continues to explore the appropriation of emptied-out motifs (the monolith, the drive-in screen, the lone figure in a landscape) as candy-coloured, simulated signs of new technology. Koop’s continued preference for generalized, mass-comprehended symbols is particularly contrived in a large-screen video of a collaborative piece performed on opening night. Choreographed by Jolene Bailie, dancers dressed head-to-toe in black slink around the exhibition space with mime-like deliberateness. These dancers, the press release seems to imply, are our robotic counterparts who encounter a shadowy, spectral landscape of mediated, technological isolation. Of the majority of work in the exhibition, Human Hybrid appears to be taking the most direct position for the idea of painting needing to stand its ground in the face of alienating, mediated experience. The work seems to claim that painting can only be taken seriously when subservient to populist, theatrical caricatures of itself; the idea of painting as a screen must be driven home with un-ironic bombast. In contrast to the quieter, painterly handling in Koop’s grey nocturnes, her conceptual screens fail to situate themselves as paintings within a global, electronic temporality which is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere.

Koop’s work characteristically imagines, then allegorizes spaces of social and technological existence, while in her most articulate tonal paintings, she allows a more suggestive sense of this existence to be located within a toned-down subtlety of paint. Her masterful paintings in grey, both monochromatic landscapes and psychic spaces, show the artist’s trust in the inherent communicability of her chosen medium, and a trust in the viewer to want to engage on less confrontational and more personally affective terms.

Works cited:

Foster, Hal. “Signs Taken for Wonders.” Painting, Terry R. Myers, ed. London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011. Pg. 47.

Enright, Robert. “Wanda Koop’s 360-degree vision.” 2011. The Globe and Mail 22 Feb. 2011.

*see images of Wanda Koop's work here*

*this review was written to accompany my notes on Sandra Meigs; both were collected for a Grad Seminar class assignment in April, 2011*