2021 | WANDA KOOP + OLI EPP
SOUVENIR
MONTREAL
Apr 1 - May 15

SOUVENIR

Apr 1 - May 15, 2021

Blouin Division is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Wanda Koop and Oli Epp.

In his first exhibition with the gallery, the UK-based Epp explores, in his words, “the current capitalist landscape and modern-day tourist tropes and traps.” Through his paintings, the viewer is invited on a world tour of dubious travel destinations, joining influencers on beaches, muscle bros in tanning beds, and pop-star stewardesses in the skies. Amid climate change and a global pandemic, the jet-set abandon of Epp’s protagonists horrifies as much as tantalizes, complicating our desires with an undercurrent of dread.

In one painting, a flaming jetliner plummets Icarus-like through the night, putting the fear in FOMO. In another, an orca pelted with dive sticks shrivels in its tank, holes in its hide revealing human knees and toes. It appears the Sea World animal is one of us, locked in captivity and environmentally vulnerable. Epp captures an air of nostalgia and anticipation, as well as the curdled hype of Fyre Festival and Sea World. In a pointed reference to Britney Spears, his Bon Voyage invokes the singer’s turn as a stewardess in her video for the hit song Toxic. The painting slithers with sexy camp, but a drop-down oxygen mask and fasten-seat-belt sign spell disaster. The “poisoned paradise” of Britney’s song is near. Buckle up.

While Epp’s paintings parse the ephemera of contemporary pop culture, Wanda Koop’s take a long cinematographic step back, scanning water-tops and sounding out horizons as though spying the world from a remote submarine. No artist carves out quite as much pictorial depth as Koop can. Her compositions include startlingly frontal symbols, behind which landscapes dissolve. In Barcode Face, a red, window-like barcode commands the viewer’s gaze, hovering above distant peninsulas. The painting watches us watch. The barcodes are eyes, scanning outward as we look in.

Symbols reminiscent of her iconic Sightlines and Hybrid Human series have emerged since the artist decamped to her new Riding Mountain studio. These luminous doorways float above bodies of water, swinging outward and welcoming the viewer into spaces beyond the visible world. Intriguing in their ambiguity, the portals might be our technologies, beckoning us with their dangers and possibilities.

Considered together, Epp and Koop’s paintings crystalize into a potent vision of our collective psyche, our relationship to nature, and our gradual return to travel and trade. Soon, their paintings promise, we will be released from our long captivity, but not from our enduring responsibility to our planet.