Currently on view: Montreal
Wanda Koop: No News
at Galerie Division
19 November 2011 – 12 February 2012
Wanda Koop “Friendly Fire (No News Series)” 2011, Acrylic on canvas, 79.5″ x 119″. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Division
No news is good news as we say, to suggest we only hear of a particular place or situation when something bad is happening. This is symptomatic of the deeply-rooted western narrative traditions which center on dramatic tension, taking origin in Greek tragedy but very much actualized in contemporary mass media. In other words, happy feelings tend to signal the end of a story. In this line of thought, Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop’s new painting series entitled “No Newsâ€, feeds on contradicting these assumptions with her catchy pictures.
Koop’s current show at Montréal’s Galerie Division traces a continuation from previous series such as Green Zones (2003–09), manipulating images from daily TV news reports which she constantly scribbles down on post-it notes to later transfer onto canvas. The artist’s use of painting justly draws enough distance with broadcast technologies to establish a discourse of critical awareness that would seem uneasy via video art. But the electric colors, graphic overlays and fragmentation of the painted surface into multiple storylines nonetheless confirm a vocabulary pertaining to television.
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