Carol Armstrong

Darby English

Rachel Hann

Solvieg Ovstebo

Catriona Macleod

Los Angeles-based artist Silke Otto-Knapp has developed a painting practice characterized by its rigorous process and attentiveness to the medium's possibilities. Using layers of black watercolor pigment, she builds up delicate surfaces, producing subtle variations in density and a powerful sense of atmosphere. Otto-Knapp's exhibition at the Renaissance Society, In the waiting room, presented a new group of large-scale free-standing paintings in that evokes a multidimensional stage set. Some depict silhouetted bodies while others introduce scenic elements reminiscent of painted backdrops. Offering a close look at the exhibition, this volume includes an array of illustrations, a conversation between curator Solveig Øvstebø and the artist, and four newly commissioned essays by Carol Armstrong, Darby English, Rachel Hann, and Catriona MacLeod, grounded in art history and performance studies.

In the Waiting Room

Silke Otto-Knapp

Focused on the contemporary Anglophone adoption from the 1960s onwards, Beyond Scenographyexplores the porous state of modern theatre-making to argue a critical distinction between scenography (as place orientation) and scenographics (that which orientate acts of worlding, of staging). With sections on installation art and gardening as well as protest and placemaking, this book is an argument for what scenography does: how assemblages of scenographic traits orientate, situate, and shape staged events. It revisits the symbiosis of stage and scene to challenge the assumed determinism that stages precede scenography. One of the conclusions of this book is that there is no theatre practice without scenography, no stages without scenographics. Beyond Scenographyoffers a manifesto for a renewed theory of scenographic practice.

Rachel Hann

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