Annika Koops

The Ruins
2 to 15 November 2009
Depot Gallery, Danks Street, Waterloo, New South Wales

The Future Ruins

'Allegories are, in the realm of thought, what ruins are in the realm of things'
– Walter Benjamin 1

Annika Koops new work for The Ruins follows a similar thematic trajectory to that of past works. Koops continues to investigate her interest in the construction and sociological ramifications of online networks, communities and virtual environments. These themes are interwoven with art historical references from 16th and 17th century painting, still life, and religious and allegorical painting. What is also maintained is the quietly uncanny quality of Koops' photographic and painted works. While they actively reference historic and contemporary movements in painting, there is also a speculative fictional quality to Koops' strange and cold imaginings that evokes the qualities of Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale (1985) or the poetry and prose of Sylvia Plath.

Koops displays a technical proficiency in painting combined with a social-realist approach that allies her work with that of Australian painters Jan Nelson and Nadine Christensen. All three share an inclination toward a highly illusionistic or optical depth and combine a psychological intensity with the subtle inclusion of technological devices. What makes Koops unique is her conscious cultivation of a technical and physical awkwardness within the works. Her bodily representations are deliberately off-kilter, stretched and warped. Developed over seven years of exhibition history they oscillate between Neo-classical beauty and the selfconsciousness of the reluctant or real subject like those found in the recent internet phenomenon Awkward Family Photos.com.

One new series titled Still Second Life (oil on linen, 2009) is a subtle and fragmented suite of paintings. These range from small works depicting sole elements to mid-sized canvases of interior spaces. Through an armchair, an ultra modern lounge room, a floating faceted jewel or a World of Warcraft suit of armour, Koops studies how objects and domestic spaces are represented in these networks and virtual worlds. There is an emptiness revealed in these interiors, some of which are sourced from Real Estate advertisements and catalogues, now largely digitally rendered three-dimensional representations of how your ideal home/space could be.

The online community Second Life is an ongoing interest of Koops'; how dream homes are created, how replicants of domestic environments are constructed and the aesthetic choices made by the participants in these networks. Koops is also interested in the avatar, the visual incarnations of the self in networks like Second Life and the social implications of this role-playing. Through her work she asks what comparison can be made between the contemporary avatar and historical portraiture? How important is sociological illustration within portraiture? And how can the intricate narrative of genre painting or historic representations of aristocratic families be compared to the relatively accessible portraiture of the C21st avatar? This evocative series of studies was undertaken at the end or the start of Koops'day in the studio, and deliberately reflects the rhizomatic structure and nature of the internet. Second Life raises many questions about how and why we choose to render object, subject and context in the digital world. These canvases are consciously dislocating, portraying simulacra of real and virtual worlds.

Starcraft Number 1 (oil on linen, 2009) is one of six close-cropped portraits in the exhibition. It depicts 'Tossgirl' the professional gaming celebrity from Korea. These portraits use found images or online avatars as source material, the artist then dresses these images with mismatched accoutrements echoing the often amateur and pick and mix approach of virtual design. Koops uses these online identities to explore the supposed anomic results of immersion in the digital world. Tossgirl is only one of the many personalities in PC rooms across the world, where players attend with friends but ironically engage in the solitary pursuit of a collective. Facebook is another online network through which Koops explores the representation of identity, how social status is established and the neuroses it provokes. Not just a social networking site, Facebook is repository of insecurity and social and personal vanity.

Some of the portraits in this series employ a grey tone underpainting called grisaille or dead colouring, a technique seen in C15th Flemish painting. Grisaille creates a tonal appearance and depth of illustration upon which textures and skin tones can be overlayed. Its similarity to the process of 3D modelling is one of the focal points of Koops' work for this exhibition. The 3D modelling software that is employed to create realistic representations within virtual space is similar to painting on a technical level. An automated mathematical process using wire mesh, much like a preparatory or perspective drawing, dictates the level of the tones. There is a growing movement on forums and websites that focuses on including physiognomic flaws and physical imperfections within avatar incarnations in order to make avatars appear more real.

Mixed Mythologies (oil on board, 2009) includes five works employing a loose sgrafitto technique, in this case a linear scratching back from a black surface to reveal white underpainting. Explored here are religious iconographies, Madonna and Child to Dutch still life or vanitas painting and how these can be translated into contemporary representations of desire. Allegory in the form of Ovid's Metamorphosis surfaces here with an image of Leda and the Swan. Koops approaches allegory as a non-linear or parasitic strategy, functioning in the same way as networked or multi-faceted identities online.2 These works are scratched out and modelled in black and white much like the 3D netting or polygonal mesh used in digital modelling.

Included in The Ruins are three photographs of a female subject, Photoshoped to brilliant luminescence and porcelain beauty. They evoke the skin tones and body shapes used by French Neoclassical painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. Second Something (Lambda Print, 2009) most aptly conveys the languid pose and manipulation of an Ingres model. In Double Nothing (Lambda Print, 2009) this perfection is strikingly contrasted with the mode'Ts real face. These photographs are created using multiple layers in Photoshop much like underpainting traditions, using a base and then a series of transparent layers to add colour and texture. In Second Something (Lambda Print, 2009) Koops employs her now signature motif of a seated woman in a sparse interior setting. The body is manipulated, limbs stretched and neck elongated into an idealized representation of the subject.

Koops says that the next stage in her artistic research will include the study and use of 3D modelling software like Poser, a program that requires the composition of forms from generic modules, allowing the user to try on identities and create the fictional from scratch. She also acknowledges that within this digital revolution, technologies are constantly being outdated, even the term virtual reality is now considered retro, full of memory and illusion, already a ruin of an outmoded past.

Meredith Turnbull, 2009

Meredith Turnbull is Gallery Manger/Curator of the Margaret Lawrence Gallery. She is also a Melbourne based artist and writer.

1 Walter Benjamin, 'The Ruin', The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, eds, Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2008, p 180.

2 A concept derived from German theorist and philosopher Walter Benjamin and outlined in his essay The Antinomies of Allegory Exegesis in the above text. Benjamin's ideas are also explored in reference to the digital age in 'Gursky, Ruff and Demand: allegories of the real and the return of history' by Neil Matheson in The State of the Real: Aesthetics in the Digital Age, eds, Damain Sutton, Susan Brind, Ray McKenzie, pp , I. B. Tauris and Co Ltd, New York, 2007.

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