Mayberry Fine Art, Winnipeg
Private Collection, Manitoba
Koop’s practice explores scenes of urbanization and industrialization as these forces interface with the natural world. Her works employ unexpected formal choices that ask contemporary viewers to reconsider imagery delivered through some of the inherited visual conventions of pastoral landscape painting, such as atmospheric perspective. Taking its name from American poet Wallace Stevens’ titular poem, Koop’s 1992 series “An Evening Without Angels” is emblematic of the artist’s approach to rendering serene urban landscapes in unorthodox, muted palettes that divorce them from temporal specificity or geographic place. An etheric, twilight quality pervades this depiction of two isolated figures observing a tree-lined waterfall—a natural phenomenon ubiquitous in historical landscape painting, yet here seems to flout aesthetic tradition as it tumbles from the upper right half of the composition into a partially dry, lavender-hued reservoir. To experience one of Koop’s paintings of the natural world is to complicate one’s already fraught individual relationship with contemporary ecological concerns.
