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.

This book is published on occasion of the parallel exhibitions Silke Otto-Knapp presented in two markedly different locations: on Fogo Island, Newfoundland, and at the Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, Vienna. The contrasting influences of place--between rural and urban, new and old world--is evident in the selection of works presented and compiled in this catalogue. The partnering of these exhibitions clearly brings into focus questions about art and its contexts. The tensions between nature and culture provide an appropriate figure for the artwork: a context imagined and devised for the circumstances of its own activation. Questions of Travel includes essays by Susan Morgan and Vanessa Joan Müller and a conversation between Otto-Knapp and Nicolaus Schafhausen. Müller reflects on how the tensions Otto-Knapp's artwork engenders are the substance of its experience, while Morgan approaches the work via three significant influences: the cultural geographer J. B. Jackson; avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin and her husband, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin; and the poems of Elizabeth Bishop. In the conversation with Schafhausen, Otto-Knapp likens the art exhibition to "a theatre situation that is both distinctly separate from reality and engaged with it at the same time." As the activating element of an exhibition, the viewer could also be said to embody the reality of a work's engagement. Otto-Knapp took the title for this project, "Questions of Travel," from Bishop's poem of the same name, which has been reprinted for this catalogue. Published on the occasion of Otto-Knapp's exhibitions "Questions of Travel (Wien)," Kunsthalle Wien Karlsplatz, March 12-May 25, 2014, and "Questions of Travel (Fogo Island)," Fogo Island Gallery, April 16-August 31, 2014. Copublished with Fogo Islands Arts and Kunsthalle Wien Contributors Elizabeth Bishop, Susan Morgan, Vanessa Joan Müller, Nicolaus Schafhausen