The Brooklyn Rail

Magnetic Field began in a forest. Wanda Koop was looking at the trees near her studio in Riding Mountain, Manitoba, when she noticed that they seemed to contain a message. Two trees angled towards each other, and another just to their right, appeared to spell those absolutely notorious letters: AI.

In her new exhibition with Night Gallery at Arsenal Contemporary, Koop memorializes these “AI Ghost Trees” in acrylic on canvas, excerpting them from her property and onto abstracted gradients. Ghost Tree AI - Soft Pink (2024) shows three skinny, birch-like trees stretching across a blush-colored space, gently floating above their own reflection. Ghost Tree AI (Grey Sky) (2024) takes on a spookier effect: the knotty trees glow bright pink against a barren, Magritte-like landscape. The paintings seem to ask, “did the AI trees foreshadow generative AI’s environmental impact?” While we are wondering, Koop cuts the tension with laughter. Because isn’t that absurd? These paintings are visual puns that wink at their own gravity.

The moon plays another leading role in Magnetic Field, as Koop affixes it to variegated skies. The works return to the subject of her 2024 monographic exhibition, Who Owns the Moon at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. But where the Montreal moons lingered above skylines and horizons, here, they are suspended among the same abstractions as the “AI Ghost Trees.” The Magnetic Field moons are perfect circles that, like the trees, take on many attitudes. They play with depth perception: the moons alternately seem to jump out from the sky or sink like black holes. Some glow like the afternoon moon. Others hang sequentially like Andy Warhol’s sunsets.

The larger-scale works remind us of the intrusive forces in our lives, from the mundane to the disastrous. In Untethered - Pale Blue (2025), a white moon hangs against a rippling, striped sky. An ambiguous black curve in the lower left corner suggests it is being framed by an airplane window or binoculars. We may be looking at the moon, but where are we looking from? Our vision is mediated by something we cannot quite make out. In Evacuate (2025), a bright orange moon pulses in the air. It is appropriately shocking and hard to look at; Evacuate references the 2025 Canadian wildfires that forced twenty thousand people to leave their homes.

As Koop’s paintings explore the overlap between the natural world and artificial intelligence, the center of that Venn diagram seems to be painting itself. The works exert an unseen force on the viewer, not unlike the pull of an iPhone in the pocket or the moon drawing out the tides. Koop underlines this idea in Still - Luminous Orange and Sky Blue (2020), a deceptively minimalist grey-and-blue-ombré painting. At the very top, Koop has painted the canvas edge a vibrant orange that radiates quietly, out of sight. As a group, Koop’s paintings seem to carry the same tune, humming together, creating their own magnetic field.

For decades, Koop has asked what painting has the capacity to do. Her works have variously contemplated war, surveillance, displacement, violence, and memory, as she distills her daily observations into a visual language that is at once incisive and calming, expansive and measured. She takes one of the world’s oldest professions—artist, storyteller—and brings them up to speed. And as dismal as our collective future can often seem, Koop’s work equally reminds us that paintings have survived all manner of these historic threats. The moon will rise again.