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Location
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Newnham - Building D - Level 2 - Hallway right of D2000
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Title
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Sleeping Giant (View from the Here Series: Native Fires)
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Artist's Statement
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"I don't really work on paintings as such; I've always worked in a series, or a continuum of ideas and thoughts.”
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National Art Gallery of Canada
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Description
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"Koop’s new suite of paintings, VIEW from HERE, both affirms and disrupts two quite different genres: landscape and portraiture. Using ink and gouache, these works use landscape tropes to compose immense and surreal human heads that seem to float in ambiguous space. Unmoored from any depiction of the body, their scale demands a paradoxical bodily encounter with the viewer, one that parallels the artist’s physical engagement with both medium and ground in creating them. Each of the eight heads recalls elements of one of Koop’s earlier landscape series, such as Satellite Cities, Native Fires, and Deep Bay, and all pose existential questions about who we are, how we are socially constructed, and what we understand about our relationship with the natural world."
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Downtown Winnipeg Biz
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It’s difficult not to associate this particular image (Sleeping Giant) with colonialism, especially given the representation of indigenous land and its subsequent change in the various views depicted. In Sleeping Giant, a visage is formed from three mountains floating in a lake, all of which take on the shape of a reclining figure. This geological formation exists in Thunder Bay and represents, in Ojibway culture, the figure of Nanabijou, who lay down to sleep over a silver mine to protect it from resource-hungry European settlers. Native Fires is painted from Koop’s memory of small bonfires lit by the Red River in Winnipeg. During the summer the river became a place of leisure and communal gathering for indigenous people, among others. Koop notes that the fires were always put out by the police, who held competing views of how the land should be used and had the power to implement them.
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Momus
Wanda Koop (b. 1951)