By Chloé Harper Gold
Have you ever had those dreams where you’re in a familiar place that’s just off somehow? Like you’re in the hallway of your high school and the lockers are made of wet floral foam. Or you’re in your own house and there’s a neon green monitor lizard hanging out on the La-Z-Boy and you only think it’s weird because you don’t remember buying the La-Z-Boy. Or you’re in your local subway station and instead of the usual platform floor made from concrete and antibiotic-resistant bacteria, you’re standing on grass and feeling wildflowers brush against your ankles.
Ryan Koopmans, the artist behind “The Wild Within,” is a master of this liminality, and he’s back with another dreamy NFT art series that depicts human-made environments taken over by natural plant life. While “The Wild Within” focused on abandoned Soviet-era buildings in Georgia, “Tunnel Vision” takes place in the underground metro stations in Stockholm, Sweden.
It’s taking some of the same ideas and themes from “The Wild Within,” but applying it to a more contemporary and slightly different—but still human-made—environment. It looks at the relationship between the natural worlds and the artificial worlds and the nuances, the paradoxes, and sometimes the dynamic relationship between the two and how they interact.
Ryan Koopmans
Born in the Netherlands and raised in British Columbia, Canada, Koopmans moved to New York after completing university at the Vancouver campus of University of British Columbia. He went to grad school at The School of Visual Arts where he earned his Masters of Fine Art in Photography, Video & Related Media in 2012. Two years later, he packed up and traveled the world as a professional photographer before settling in Stockholm, where his creative collaborator, Swedish artist Alice Wexell, also lives.
The two of us combined forces to create “The Wild Within,” which combined photographic documentary content with 3D elements and brought everything together into a new multimedia form of presentation. It took several years of going back and forth to this town in Georgia and learning about the social and cultural history and the political history, and building contacts and giving back to the local people and local society and building a long-term relationship with them.
Ryan Koopmans
Koopmans collaborated with Wexell on “Tunnel Vision,” too. The first work in the series, “Rush Hour,” depicts a pair of escalators leading in and out of a metro station. The station’s floor is an overgrowth of greenery; moss climbs the staircase between the escalators and ivy drapes over the hanging signs.
The fiery red “ceiling” of the station isn’t really a ceiling at all; it looks more…
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