Catalogue featuring Wanda Koop’s Green Zone series of paintings. The Green Zone paintings ask us to reconsider imagery that is delivered to us through both cultural history and contemporary broadcast media.
Koop 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.
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.