A leader in contemporary landscape art, Koop critically reexamines the tradition of rendering the Canadian landscape in a contemporary era of industry and technological development. Opting for soft pastel palettes with bold injections of contrasting colour, the artist plays with the presumption of serenity within landscape art and instead questions the advancement and shifting definitions of the landscape. Heavily influenced by mass media dissemination of imagery and current events in urbanism, Koop poetically examines the intersections of industry and the natural landscape to reconsider a the collective cultural history.
In the artist’s “Satellite Cities Series”, industrial landscapes are often depicted as solitary, floating islands with fluid tendrils reaching to the edges of the canvas, emphasizing both the development of urban spaces within a natural landscape, but also a feeling of solitude and perhaps loneliness within this new definition of a landscape. Nondescript titles of the works eradicate geographical placement of the cities, thus offering an existential, and perhaps even post-apocalyptic, portrayal of contemporary city spaces. Koop forces the viewer to question the social constructs within these newly developed cities and how we relate - both individually and collectively - to our natural surroundings.
