When you stand in the moonlight, the world seems like a different kind of place. All the features of the landscape are there, and yet they seem like ghostly versions of themselves. A glazing of silver is cast overall, transforming the real into something mystical, leaching away colour and detail. It’s like looking at a photographic negative; areas of darkness can appear oddly illuminated, catching the light.
This is what it feels like to look at the paintings of German-born Silke Otto-Knapp, whose work is currently on view in Toronto at the Art Gallery of Ontario in an exhibition curated by contemporary and modern-art curator Kitty Scott. Standing in the gallery spaces, surveying Otto-Knapp’s landscapes, portraits and theatrical tableaux, you feel a kind of calm, and a sense of sinking into a dream world, a space of contemplation and deep solitude.
In that world there are ghosts, and most of them are women, figures from the world of literature (the poet Elizabeth Bishop), visual art (artist and writer Florine Stettheimer, Victorian adventurer and botanical painter Marianne North, and Emily Carr) and dance (Anna Halprin, the legendary modern-dance choreographer who ran the famed Tamalpa Institute dance workshop from her hillside home in northern California, a space that once served as a creative seedbed for the likes of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham). Each portrait serves as a kind of wormhole into a receding historic past; we seem to catch these women just as they sink out of view, their contours limned in a generalized way, as is indeed the case for those who try to remember them – famous women who nonetheless seem less firm in our collective memory than their male counterparts. “I call them portraits, but they don’t have faces,” she told me last week on the phone, from her new home in Pasadena, Calif. “They come from literature, but they are not narrative.” Like the faceless portraits of Vanessa Bell, they suggest the enigma of another’s life, remaining determinedly open-ended, ready to receive our projections.
Otto-Knapp, who came to teach at UCLA after years of living and making art in London, relies upon the archive of photography for her sources. “These are all images that you can find easily on Google,” she says. “These are the ones that come up.” Encountering them reconstituted in her paintings, one has a sense of images dimly remembered – Stettheimer’s luxurious New York drawing room with the studio glimpsed through drawn-back curtains, Elizabeth Bishop’s alert pose leaning out at a windowsill, or Emily Carr in her famous studio portrait by the Vancouver photographer and art critic Harold Mortimer-Lamb.
The Carr image in particular underwent heavy revisions, she says, with the artist painting in watercolour on canvas then scrubbing the image down and overlaying it again and again before arriving at her final version. “I was thinking about Matisse’s very particular way of painting women, the way he used the line,” she adds. Here, instead of a dark line of definition, she employs a “negative line” of bleached-out erasure, a subtle counterpoint to the French master’s inky, sensuous gestures.
Otto-Knapp’s painterly technique can be seen as a reconsideration of a male tradition in modern painting from de Kooning and Pollock forward, one that could be described as ejaculatory, and which is epitomized in the Jean-Michel Basquiat paintings in the AGO’s upstairs galleries, with their heavy laying-on of materials and wild expressive force. Instead, Otto-Knapp scrubs and dabs her watercolour pigments into the canvas with a kind of measured tentativeness, removing much of the trace of the hand, and taking a more modest approach to the surface.
In addition to the portraits, the exhibition includes a number of paintings of modern dancers, their poses tightly constrained within the frame of pictorial space (the performances of painter and dancer both delimited by the canvas edge in an implicit pairing). She is also showing landscapes. In these, the theme of moonlight becomes literal, infusing the scenes with a kind of enchantment. These places are Canadian; over the past several years, Otto-Knapp has been awarded several residencies at the Fogo Island workshop, on the remote Newfoundland island outpost, and has created what may be the definitive account of that rugged, storm-scoured topography, edged by mineral-dark seas. Islands rise from silvered surfaces, wreathed in a kind of fog, suggesting lapses in memory, time and vision. Boulders and rocks are reduced to mere contours, as detail is subsumed in atmosphere. Moving beyond literal description of the physical world, Otto-Knapp brings us into a realm of distilled moodiness, a space of imagination that summons the ghosts of Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse) or Elizabeth Bishop, whose phrase “Land lies in water” serves as the exhibition’s title.
Otto-Knapp will be speaking about her paintings at the AGO on Wednesday evening, and has invited the Japanese artist Ei Arakawa and the New York-based Hawaiian dance team Halau Hula O Na Mele ’Aina O Hawai’i to join her for the occasion. Here it is the lush Pacific that will be conjured. Arakawa and the Hawaiian dance and percussion group, under the direction of native Hawaiian Luana Haraguchi, will tell stories of Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, and perform traditional Hawaiian hula (Kahiko).
Otto-Knapp is considering moving the Carr portrait into the performance space for that evening, giving her her rightful place at this nexus of cross-cultural pollination. “The colours in the dancers’ costumes are very bright and flamboyant,” she says, a contrast to her own shimmering, sepulchral paintings, but their performance will be far more than mere entertainment. “The hula set out the rules for living,” she says. Like the potlatch dances of the Northwest Coast, which fascinated Carr a century ago, “the chanting and the percussion in the hula expressed a relationship to nature. It was about fishing, there was the mimicking of birdsong. I want my painting to be a kind of backdrop, where something might happen in front of them.”
Silke Otto-Knapp: Land Lies in Water continues at the Art Gallery of Ontario until July 19. Otto-Knapp will be speaking on March 18 at 5:30 p.m. in Jackman Hall, with the performance following in Walker Court at 7 (ago.net).