Wanda Koop’s “In Absentia” is a wondrous but lonely exhibition, one which offers ghostly, elegiac images of the New York skyline. “In Absentia (Light Blue-Shell Pink)” evokes a sunrise; other works are pre-dawn in palette, while still others offer a rich orange and maroon sunset. “In Absentia (Blue Ash Rose-Scarlet Red)” is a nightfall, one that feels riven with high hopes and faded ambitions. The Canadian artist’s large-scale landscapes here serve the same function as haiku does in poetry: succinct, luminous, and open to interpretation. Koop poignantly captures the city and what it represents both to the American mythology of its dynamism and our personal experience of it as lived environment.
