Annika Koops: Shadow Moves

Exhibition continues: Saturday the 17th of December 2022

Shadow Moves is an exhibition about motion as seen through a painterly lens. It considers the emotional register of movement in the context of automation with a series of paintings called Double Binds. These works show inert forms that resemble squiggles made of steel, conveying a sense of immovable weight. Koops often adds delicate ribbons restaged versions of these shapes developed in 3D software - which hang from their dead curves and create a stark contrast of fluidity and movement. These gestures look at how animation creates the illusion of life by giving motion to the inanimate while considering how physical expression can convey complex emotional states through subtle movements. The artist links this idea to the phenomenon of automation, which now threatens areas of labour that once relied on human movement.  

Excerpt from Mimicking Life, Art Collector Issue 102, November 2022. Written by Diego Ramirez 

In these works, the velocity and illusory precision of digital technologies are both mirrored and made to slow down, dragged into the messy, material, embodied space of painting. The conspicuous re-staging of painterly gesture brings networked conditions into sharp focus: the bodily trace meets itself in altered from, emphasising both the ease with which it can be digitally manipulated and recombined and the shadows it casts in the wake of that transformation.

Annika Koops is a Naarm (Melbourne) based artist working between painting and digital media. Recent work charts the porosity of boundaries between physical and virtual spaces, objects, and persona. Her works consider how subjectivity may be distilled and reformatted in the digital realm. Current work contrasts imaging technologies associated with biometrics with painterly practice to creatively interpret how bodily traces operate in cultural and economic fields.

Annika Koops has been the recipient of a number of significant grants and prizes including Australia Council Arts Projects for Individuals and Groups, Australia Council British School, Rome Residency, The Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch Traveling Fellowship, and an Australian Postgraduate Award. She has been invited to participate in international exhibitions such as Roman Remains, Transition Gallery, London, and the inaugural Bristol Biennial as well as having exhibited at a range of public institutions, artist-run spaces and private galleries in Australia.

She has undertaken National and International residencies, most recently as a visiting fellow with UNSW Art and Design (2020). Her work is included in significant Australian public collections such as Art Bank, MONA Hobart and The University of Melbourne Collection