Wanda Koop

Visual Language

Wanda Koop refers to her work as a ‘visual language’. “I don’t think you have to have studied years of art in order to access it,” she maintains, “but you have to come to it with an open mind. You have to be able to allow yourself to read it because it’s just there for you to read.” What is fascinating about this language is that it is helpful when attempting to understand the interaction between technology and the natural world. The Winnipeg-based artist employs an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary that effectively serves as an international language.

In many of her paintings Koop superimposes dots, lines, brackets and even crosshairs over representations of topographical features, including human figures. We might find a bright orange dot hanging above a canal, or two yellow bars standing erect atop a landscape. The blunt shapes evoke the impact of modern technology on our capacity to observe, understand and appreciate our surroundings. We are reminded to question why we perceive things the way that we do and to recognize what lenses we look through when viewing the world.


Wanda Koop. ‘Untitled (Mauve Landscape – Yellow Bars)’, 2009.

Wanda Koop is one of the most celebrated artists in Canada. Born in Vancouver in 1951 to Russian Mennonite parents, she moved as a young girl with her family to Winnipeg. The aspiring painter graduated from the University of Manitoba in 1973. Prior to completing school, her work was included in an exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. This marked the beginning of a career that now stretches out beyond three decades, highlighted by more than fifty solo exhibitions. Koop holds honourary degrees from the University of Winnipeg, the Emily Carr Institute, and her alma mater. She was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada in 2006.

In her strikingly attractive studio space in Winnipeg, the artist shared her thoughts on what she terms the ‘interface’ between technology and the natural world, and how this is portrayed in her work. The time is definitely right for a little reflection. An elaborate survey of her work titled ‘At the Edge of Experience’ will be on display at the Winnipeg Art Gallery from September 11, 2010 to January 16, 2011. In February 2011 the exhibition shifts to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The show will feature a new, full installation called ‘Hybrid Human’, as well as space dedicated to large-scale paintings from previous projects. Going beyond the core presentation, a studio room complete with drawings, notes, maquettes and books will offer insight into how the artist translates her thoughts into images.

In the following conversation, Koop discusses how living in Winnipeg has impacted her work, describing the city as ‘a raw, very real place.’ She talks about the large Aboriginal population in Winnipeg, which serves, from her perspective, as a constant reminder of the chronology of North American civilization. “A theme in some of my work over the years has been that First Nations are still making fires on the riverbank,” Koop explains. “As the city encroaches and the river walkways are being expanded, for as long as I can remember the police would come along and tell them to put out their fires. One of my strongest paintings, I think, is called ‘Native Fires’. It’s the religious power, the political power, and the corporate power: the steeple, the copula, and the large high-rise on the horizon of this riverbank with two fires burning and reflecting in the water. To me, that’s probably the most compact painting that I’ve ever done in terms of how I think and view the world. It’s a kind of compression of everything all in one image.”


Wanda Koop. ‘Native Fires’, 1996.

Note the placement of the two fires. The flames determine how the entire scene is viewed in much the same way that dots, lines and crosshairs influence the way that we view landscapes in many of her other pieces. In one painting from the 1999-2001 series called Sightlines, the Winnipegger actually revisited the ‘Native Fires’ vista, replacing the flames with ominous crosshairs. It is interesting to consider the correlation between the flames and the technological markers.

The Sightlines body of work is crucial to understanding how Koop has responded to a contemporary phenomenon, specifically the way in which television audiences passively digest extreme human violence. “It started with the Bosnian war,” Koop explains. “I was working on a series of landscapes, and watching, for the first time, sitting in the cockpit of a bomber plane, watching a sightline line up and knowing that seconds later there was a slight implosion on the ground, and realizing that the target had been hit and someone had died. And we’re watching it in real time! Gradually I started making notes of all the variables of these sightlines.”


Wanda Koop, ‘Sightline (Orange Line)’, 2000.

With the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, Koop began to chronicle the sensation of watching the conflict on television by making notes in the dark on post-it notes. This act of documentation propelled her work on the ambitious project titled Green Zone, a large collection spanning 2003-2009. It explores the strangeness of watching war on television, listening to news anchors explain the explosions and fires in calming tones. With the simple act of taking notes, Koop feels that she was able to stop the incessant flow of images in order to provide herself time to think. This opportunity for rumination is extended to viewers of her paintings. Emphatically we can feel the sensation of seeing everything through some technological device. On many pieces in the Green Zone series, observers will note thin lines and wide bars imposed on the landscapes, bringing to mind the scrawl lines on television network newscasts, which frame the way that we absorb information.


Wanda Koop. ‘Green Zone (Combat-white Interference)’, 2006.

Koop continues to make notes when watching television, mostly drawing from newscasts, finding the method especially worthwhile for isolating images of the jagged line between technology and the natural world. “Gradually all of the environmental issues, the ice caps melting, it’s all on television. Everything is on television! We’re constantly reminded of what we’re doing and what is happening.” One wonders what she might do with images from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico!

The extensive body of work that Wanda Koop has produced over the years might seem overwhelming at first. Certainly there is a lot to absorb and to consider. Her work stands in opposition to the numbness that might overtake the minds of all who live in a tight technological environment. In the interview below she hints at several entry points for viewers. Perhaps most significantly she stresses the way in which her paintings help people to feel deeply what is happening in the world.

CI: Let me begin by attempting to get to the heart of what I want to ask you. It involves the sense in your work of the realization of how technology codes the way we all see the world. It struck me that, in your work, the concern is not so much with technology as gadgetry - cell phones and hydraulics - but technology as a mode of being, as the way we actually live. In a general way, how would you characterize the presence of the technological in your work?

WK: It’s a constant interface between the natural world and how technology impacts that world. I use symbolism. I think of the body of work Sightlines. It started with the Bosnian war. I was working on a series of landscapes and watching, for the first time, sitting in the cockpit of a bomber plane, watching a sightline line up and knowing that seconds later there was a slight implosion on the ground, and realizing that the target had been hit and someone had died. And we’re watching it in real time! Gradually I started making notes of all the variables of these sightlines.

As I continued to make these paintings of landscapes, in fact a trucker came to see me at the time when I was working on the landscape portion of this body of work. He goes, ‘hey Wanda, you and I have been to all the same places’ – this long-haul trucker and myself! What I loved about that was that my landscapes were remembered landscapes, or an archetype of the idea of landscape that is embedded in all of us. I felt, in a sense, that the landscape I was working with was this metaphor for us as human beings, but then to see these sightlines, these technological things, this mediator – especially with the war technology – it became a signifier that we were on the other side of it, looking through it.

After a while I started to notice that almost all the ads on television, if you actually look at television ads, there are now sightlines, there is a lining up before we can even look at what is being fed back to us, like we are actually filtering it through some technological device in order for us to see it. It might be a beautiful view of a beach, and then some kind of technological marker or sightline comes into view, and we are viewing this thing that we are supposed to want or long for through this marker. When I did the Sightlines body of work, it wasn’t so much about war. It was more about this interface between the natural world and technology.

CI: On the idea of looking through – as humans we are on one side looking through some apparatus, like a war pilot looking through a lens, but there is also that way in which we are all really a part of the technology ourselves.

WK: Well, we are the technology. We’ve created it. It’s not something that is being done to us. We’re making it. That’s what I find so incredibly interesting in being in the world at this time. We, as humans, long for this picture of nature – especially my European friends; they love the idea of Canada because somehow it evokes something that they feel they’ve lost, some part of themselves that is no longer. In actual fact, we are no longer that. We are these hybrid beings. We’ve become hybrid beings. Genetically we’re not really different, but each generation is being hybridized. So we’re this meld: we cannot function any longer without this technology that we are making.

CI: Let me pick up on that. There is one painting that stood out to me especially. In much of your work there are representations of landscapes and then there are representations of the imposition of technology. There is a painting from 2008 called ‘Alberta Tar Sands’, which stood out to me in this respect. Obviously you travel a lot. What prompted you to work on that piece to capture what is happening in Alberta?

WK: I think that the tar sands, or the hydro dams, all those kinds of things are just of this attitude that we have that it’s all ours for the taking, or for the using or whatever. Because it is us, we can do that, and I’m fascinated that we haven’t, in a sense, really stopped to think of what the ramifications are for any of these choices that we make that seem so logical now in terms of how we’re going to survive in the immediate future. We’re not thinking about how we’re going to survive in the distant future in terms of how we impact the land and our environment. That’s very much a part of how, when I talk about technology and the land, it’s this very complex thing. It’s not just about the human being and technology.


Wanda Koop, ‘Alberta Tar Sands’, 2008.

As we progress with all this technology, what are we using it for? Are we creating these little robot bugs that can, say, for the good, be nanotechnology for operations, these small robotic computers that can fly into a quake zone and rescue people who are buried in the rubble? But they can also have little poison darts attached to them and fly into an enemy’s bedroom. You can have swarms of armies made up of little mini-robots. Those kinds of things, I think, are in the future, and that’s horrific to me! But then we are horrific. Human beings are kind of horrific if you think what we are capable of. I’m digressing, but I think the question that you are asking me, the tar sands and a lot of those images – after 2003 when I started making notes off the television, post-it notes in the dark of the Iraq war, what happened is I started making notes period, notes of images that I would see on the news. Gradually all of the environmental issues, the ice caps melting, it’s all on television. Everything is on television! We’re constantly reminded of what we’re doing and what is happening.

So I’m seeing it through this other window, and I’m stopping it. I’m not stopping those things from happening, but by making a note and making a painting, it becomes static. Somehow I’m able to allow hopefully the viewer – especially in the case of the Iraq war, we weren’t supposed to feel anything – but by isolating these images that are familiar to everybody and painting them, and painting them and painting them, I’ve had people tell me that they felt, when they came into the gallery and looked at these paintings, they could actually feel something for the first time. Yet the paintings are not full of blood and gore. They are actually the opposite. In my opinion they are the opposite. I’m using all this stuff, but in my painting I try to say something about life, about being alive. Art is this powerful vehicle.

CI: So by taking images from the TV screen, it was an attempt to stop the incessant flow of images and let us contemplate what we were seeing for a brief moment.

WK: Yeah, in a sense that is really what I’m attempting to do with this work. I need to slow it all down. I need to think about it. I include the scrawl line at the bottom. If you haven’t noticed, the television now is no longer just a picture. It’s branded. We’ve got five things happening now when we’re watching television. We’re becoming so capable of reading and looking and scrawling and texting and twittering and whatever all at the same time that we’re really not looking at anything or listening to anything. So that’s sort of my attempt to condense it all.

Let’s look at ourselves for a bit. I don’t try to be didactic in my work. I try to allow the viewer to have their own thoughts or their own feelings when they’re looking at my work, not unlike music for me, or poetry where you read something and you take it in for how you need to translate it.

CI: The industrial development in Alberta, when I saw that painting – and the scene depicts some area in the tar sands development – there are two red lines coming into the painting from the right edge and one from the left edge. What struck me, or where my mind went, was this idea that whatever problems something like the tar sands presents, the immediate solutions that we come up with are just more technological solutions, whether it’s sequestering the carbon or some other method to limit the impact. What I thought your painting captured well was how we view the environmental and social problems brought about by technological innovation. How concerned are you by our inability to think outside of that? Do you see your art, your production, as a way of helping people to at least briefly see outside, and see the more human side of how we can respond to these things?

WK: I think that, being a painter, it’s head to hand. It’s recognizing that our minds are these amazing computers also. I remember someone getting very excited and telling me that there was this virtual reality program that you could actually go into – this was years ago when virtual reality was just becoming something that we were aware of – that you could actually put this thing on your head and you could actually see what the furniture would look like in a room, all set up, and you could actually see it! I thought to myself ‘well, I don’t need to put one of those things on to see it.’

Art is this amazing thing. It is a powerful vehicle. … We think we have to fly through technology, but we have this amazing ability within us to go to worlds and places that we can imagine. Each of us has it. We all have it, and yet we’re so afraid of it! We’re afraid that we are somehow going to fail in that realm. … I call what I do ‘visual language’. I don’t think you have to have studied years of art in order to access it, but you have to come to it with an open mind. You have to be able to allow yourself to read it because it’s just there for you to read.

CI: When you said ‘visual language’, I remembered reading Martin Heidegger, the philosopher. He said that language is the ‘house of being’. It is really what we all live within. The idea of having a visual language, and absorbing your pieces, allows for a different language in which to be in.

WK: We want to explain everything away. We want to have some kind of verbal explanation, or we want technology or science to somehow give us the answers for everything. I think that is where the visual language slides in between. It’s a universal language. I can read every visual bit of information in the world.

CI: Let me try to get a little sense of the retrospective show that is coming up at the Winnipeg Art Gallery and the National Art Gallery.

WK: It’s actually a survey. It’s not a full retrospective. I’m too young for that! I’m not finished yet!

CI: In the early pieces that are a hint of what is to come, the 2009 series called ‘View From Here’, there is one painting that is just referred to as ‘Untitled (Red)’, in which a silhouette figure is standing in front of an abstract landscape, which looks like a computer monitor. Perhaps you could give some sense of how all this is going to be realized in the upcoming show.

WK: The body of work is called ‘Hybrid Human’. It went from ‘View From Here’ to ‘Hybrid Human’. The paintings are three metres by four metres. There are five of them. They’ll hang in the gallery like floating video monitors. They’ll hang in the dark and they’ll be lit in a way that each of them glows individually in the dark.


Wanda Koop. ‘Untitled (Red)’, 2009.

I’m working with a dancer, Jolene Bailie. She is choreographing a piece with five dancers. I’m also working with Hugh Conacher, a lighting designer, and sound artist Susan Chafe. We are producing a piece where there are paintings that are screens. There is a screen in a painting and the dancers will have cameras on their bodies. The dance will be recorded, and possibly the viewers, the people who are at the exhibition, their images will show up on the screen in the screen of the painting!

There will be a reflection on the floor so that viewers might find themselves looking at one of these paintings as if they have stepped out of a painting. When you enter the Gallery you won’t quite know if you are actually in a painting or if you are looking at a painting. I just love that whole notion: where does the act of seeing, or the act of being, begin? Are we looking at a painting? Are we in a painting? In terms of the screen, too, it occurred to me after a while, when I was working on depicting robots, sort of anthropomorphizing things – and for years I was trying to do this, and I think there are some really interesting drawings and notes and paintings – but as I got closer to wanting to put a body of work together, and working with Jolene Bailie, the dancer, I started to realize that the screen is the symbol of our hybridization, that that is what we are now attached to. It’s actually a visual thing. It’s a rectangle. It’s the shape of a lot of paintings. It’s a computer. It’s a television. It’s a telephone. It’s a laptop. It’s a sign out on the highway.

CI: The screen holds the target for the pilot when he drops the bomb.

WK: Absolutely! In a way, it just became very clear that I had to simplify everything that I was working with and pull it into this very minimal symbol of what we are and what we’re becoming.

CI: So there is the sense of the primacy of the screen, which I think practically everybody can relate to. We are always viewing a screen, but in this piece you are very much absorbing people into the screens. Is that a reflection of the idea that we have become screens to each other, that we don’t view people as much as humans but as projections?

WK: Well, not so much physically, but I think mentally. I have a stepdaughter. We were picking her up at the mall one day. There were four little girls walking along and they each were texting. I said, ‘who are you texting?’ They said ‘each other’.

CI: You were born in British Columbia but you have lived here in Winnipeg most of your life. How would you say that Winnipeg has altered your work as opposed to what might have happened if you lived in New York or Tokyo?

WK: I’ve lived in many places. I lived for a period of time in Paris, and I had a shared apartment in Rotterdam for thirteen years in the Netherlands. I’ve travelled extensively. I spent four months in Tokyo.

What I find interesting about Winnipeg is that it’s a raw, very real place. We have a huge Aboriginal population in the city, and I think it’s a constant reminder. Where did we come from, we Europeans, and who does this place belong to? It seems so transient in a certain way for me. My parents came from Russia. I’m a first generation Canadian. Somehow I’ve grown up very aware of this place having belonged to someone else.

I’ve lived in the core my entire life. Winnipeg has a very interesting history culturally. The Manitoba Arts Council was the first council in Canada to start supporting artists, and I think evidence of that support is starting to show around the world. We have artists from this place that are world-famous. I think that’s interesting, and I think it’s because we received support very early on. I can say that for myself! I had my first exhibition at the Winnipeg Art Gallery when I was nineteen years old. I’ve been fairly well supported. I wouldn’t say that’s how I’ve survived. It’s very difficult to survive as an artist. In a way Winnipeg allowed me the chance to grow as an artist, to live in this very real, raw place in the centre of Canada and have access to the world. I think a lot of people here live that way. We watch the world. I’ve always compared myself to a raven on the top of a post: “I’m here, but I’m watching everything!”

We’re just never really getting comfortable in our shoes here. And yet I can travel so easily, not just nationally or internationally, but the province itself is phenomenal. I don’t think people realize how interesting it is. An hour out of the city and you can be at two of the largest fresh water lakes in the world. You can be in the Canadian Shield. You can be in a mountainous area, in Riding Mountain National Park. You can be on open prairie. You can be in the desert. Topographically or geographically, it’s a fascinating province. And culturally, too – you’ve got people here from all over the world. There is not a restaurant in terms of ethnic cuisine that is missing. We can match New York or Toronto or any of those cities in terms of the range. It’s not a monochromatic community. We interface with First Nations, and I feel that’s a huge privilege. If you step out my door, there’s Thunderbird House and teepees, right out the door over here!

I live close to the river. A theme in some of my work over the years has been that First Nations are still making fires on the riverbank. As the city encroaches and the river walkways are being expanded, for as long as I can remember the police would come along and tell them to put out their fires. One of my strongest paintings, I think, is called ‘Native Fires’. It’s the religious power, the political power, and the corporate power: the steeple, the copula, and the large high-rise on the horizon of this riverbank with two fires burning and reflecting in the water. To me, that’s probably the most compact painting that I’ve ever done in terms of how I think and view the world. It’s a kind of compression of everything all in one image.

Date of Interview: 03/21/2010
Location: Winnipeg, MB
Link: www.wandakoop.com