Silke Otto-Knapp: Dancer and the Dance
Artist Silke Otto-Knapp and dancer/choreographer Flora Wiegmann view Otto-Knapp’s exhibition “Standing anywhere in the space in a relaxed position” at the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre 2009 Courtesy of the Banff Centre / photo Laura Vanags
The London-based German painter Silke Otto-Knapp led a residency at the Banff Centre last summer on the theme “Figure in a Mountain Landscape.” Focusing on investigating the tradition of plein-air painting, Otto-Knapp spent July and August of 2008 bringing groups of artists out into the open parkland to work. But for her solo show at Banff’s Walter Phillips Gallery this summer, Otto-Knapp delivers work with a slightly different sense of interiority and exteriority. Rather than focusing on the visual artist’s response to working outdoors, Otto-Knapp here, in canvases based on photos of dancers, navigates the more corporeal dimensions of inner and outer experience.
These themes are further plumbed in Otto-Knapp’s collaboration with American dancer and choreographer Flora Wiegmann. Between July 25 and August 9, Wiegmann performed in the gallery to, as the exhibition statement puts it, “make visible what the paintings cannot.” Such a collaboration (or admission of incompleteness) is an unusual move for a painter—but, as with Otto-Knapp’s embrace of an oft-maligned medium (watercolour) and the motley subjects she has chosen to base her work around in the past (Las Vegas, British botanical gardens and Busby Berkeley musicals, to name a few), the artist would seem to promise once again to skilfully transform the intellectually improbable into a flesh-and-blood success. (107 Tunnel Mtn Dr, Banff AB)
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