Wanda Koop’s new series of paintings – scenes of urbanization, industrialization and war – ask us to reconsider imagery that is delivered to us through both cultural history and contemporary broadcast media.

In Koop’s most recent work she refers to war coverage--— especially live broadcasts from Iraq during the American and British invasion— and the ways in which such coverage emotionally distances us from violent conflict.  She remarks, particularly, on the static banality of the imagery we saw through fixed cameras before, during and after aerial bombardments, and the way such banality deflects us from apprehending the true tragedy of the narrative.  Koop’s paintings reclaim what we know from what we see.  Through them, she wants us to reinvest visually diminished, morally drained and emotionally depleted images with meaning.
    
In Koop’s new work, architectural components are reduced to rudimentary horizontals, verticals and grids, and yet we are able to mentally assemble them into remembered images of our built environment.  She particularly focuses on the means by which our understanding of the world is shaped and disseminated by television.

Inspired by the glitches and break-up that occur in satellite and digital TV, marks (roving storms of dark and pale rectangles, a fleck or a haloed orb of light) also suggest a lineage of historical abstraction, a way of fracturing and reconfiguring the image that is as much about Cubism and Neo-Plasticism as it is about CNN. Occasionally, Koop stretches dark horizontal bands across the bottom of her pictorial field, a reference to the "crawl" or "super" over which still or moving text is imposed on TV News channels.  The painted bands, however, are devoid of text, again reminding us of the ways in which television images are stripped of meaning.  Koop challenges us to reinsert the missing narratives, to make the images real again.     
      
Excerpt from Robin Lawrence, August 2003

The paint drop is a form that takes shape not from a brush or any human-made implement or gesture but purely from its own viscosity and the air it falls through. It is analogous to the DNA building blocks that make up the human body or its digital representation, the pixel.  My painting practice is concerned with human physicality in an age pushing towards virtual reality.  The "staple paintings" are an attempt to reconcile digital space or systems with physical space. They are made by placing thousands of loose industrial-sized staples onto a blank canvas and then pouring paint inside each compartment. 

All painting is narrative. Whether representational or abstract, any fluctuation of the painted surface presents us with this possibility.  These paintings play with an abstract notion of undulating pixel-like fields of paint.  I chose the exhibition title "California" not just because they were created in California but because the name itself symbolized the limitless possibilities and creations of the Digital Age.