Wanda Koop: WHO OWNS THE MOON
Idea behind new show dates back to Russian Revolution
Wanda Koop, “Black Sea Portal – Luminous Red,” 2023, 119.5" x 159" (courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, photo by William Eakin)
On April 8, Winnipeg artist Wanda Koop sat among a throng of people on a hillside in Quebec’s Eastern Townships to watch the moon travel across the sky and blot out the Sun for three minutes.
“It was so incredible, I wept,” the moonstruck Koop said of the eclipse the next day as she opened an exhibition of serene, hopeful paintings, WHO OWNS THE MOON, at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Wanda Koop, “Note for Eclipse,” 36" x 48" (courtesy of the artist, photo by William Eakin)
Koop insists the title of the exhibition is more “beautiful” written in capital letters and does not end with a question mark. The title is a statement to ponder, not a question to answer, she says. As for the artist’s opinion, she believes we all own the moon, just as we all own the Earth.
The Montreal exhibition, on now through Aug. 4, was planned long before discussion of the eclipse saturated news columns but the show coincidentally fits perfectly with the timing of the eclipse when hundreds of thousands of people, including Koop, gathered in Canada, United States and Mexico to weep, holler, applaud or otherwise demonstrate their emotional relationship to the moon and our natural world.
Wanda Koop, “Objects of Interest – Panel 4,” 2023, 48" x 48" (courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, photo by William Eakin)
The genesis of WHO OWNS THE MOON dates back to the Russian Revolution a century ago. Koop’s ancestors were Mennonites living in Ukraine, which then was controlled by Russia. Mennonites were persecuted and Koop’s family fled to Canada, first to Vancouver, where Wanda was born, and then to Winnipeg, the base from which Wanda has built a thriving international career as a painter. (She has had more than sixty solo shows and her work has been exhibited around the world, including the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, India, Brazil, China, Japan and Italy.)
In 1997, Wanda and her mother travelled to Ukraine to see the estates once owned by the family and to find the grave of Wanda’s maternal grandmother. They were able to locate the estates but the grave was buried under a cement parking lot just two weeks before their arrival.
Koop took detailed notes and made small paintings about the Ukrainian adventure and then on Feb. 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Koop felt she had to do something. Those notes and small paintings became points of departure for WHO OWNS THE MOON.
“What can I do?” she asked herself as the war started. “I can’t stop the war because that is out of my control. But what can I do? I can make paintings.”
And paint she did. Two dozen paintings adorn the walls of the Montreal museum. They are not the usual artwork spawned by warfare. In fact, they are wonderfully peaceful, drenched in longing and nostalgia.
“I don’t want you to think of war,” Koop said in an interview. “I want you to be full of wonder and hope, but to be aware.”
Wanda Koop, “Ukrainian Quartet – Power Plant,” 2023, 84" x 84" (courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery, photo by William Eakin)
The exhibition is dominated by four large paintings, as big as 3 metres by 4 metres, revealing hazy, dreamy landscapes along the Black Sea in Crimea, a part of Ukraine annexed by Russia in 2014. Koop’s forebears often visited Crimea.
Koop’s cerebral paintings often depict landscapes, but imagined landscapes. The Crimean paintings are rare depictions of actual landscapes. We see urban or industrial environments far across the water and at different times of the day, varying from the silver light of early morning to the deep blue of midnight.
A vertical band of bright colour jarringly intersects each of the four paintings. Koop calls these bands “portals” that allow visitors to enter the landscapes the way Lewis Carroll’s Alice walks through the looking glass. The artist wants her paintings not just to be seen, but to be “experienced.”
There are also several smaller paintings referencing Koop’s 1997 trip to Ukraine — graveyard flowers and crosses and the depiction of a woman’s long hair braid. The grandmother whose grave Koop sought had worn her hair in such a braid. Upon her death, Wanda’s grandfather cut off the braid, wrapped it in tissue and placed it in a box. As a child, Wanda would frequently unwrap the braid to commune with it.
Although sparked by war, this body of work is not about war. “I wanted it to be about life and also about this whole notion of us as human beings wanting to own or to possess.” Her hope is that the paintings will “de-escalate” how people think about territory.
So, the paintings are not just about who owns Ukraine, but about the Hamas-Israeli conflict and other manifestations of what us earthlings think we own or want to own.
There are also paintings of just the moon. One of the paintings, says Koop, looks almost identical to one of China’s supposed spy balloons that was shot down last year above North America. Maybe that “moon” was actually just an “object of interest,” Koop speculated. Anyway, that “moon” was eclipsed by the U.S. military in a manner very different from what Koop calls the “incredible” eclipse of April 8.
Koop does not tell her audiences how they should think about these topics. But she does want them to ponder these big questions. ■
Wanda Koop: WHO OWNS THE MOON is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, QC now through Aug. 4.
PS: Worried you missed something? See previous Galleries West stories here or sign up for our free biweekly newsletter.
