The Luminous Playhouse Theater Company is my ongoing exploration of visual narrative, the power of implied theater, and the theater of implication.

I mean for Luminous scenes to elicit personal interpretation, inviting viewers to add their own story lines much the way children make up stories when they play with dollhouses. The Luminous drama unfolds at the edges where memory and fantasy encounter disillusionment and our tenacious longing for order and beauty, spaciousness and belonging.

The Luminous stage is a set of modular colorful plastic panels from a 1960s abstract-modern “Imagination” dollhouse, with an assortment of props and characters that I’ve collected or created myself, both for their evocative moods and their storytelling possibilities.

Since I began the project in 2005 the Luminous Playhouse has evolved as I’ve continually experimented with elements of staging and scale, light and shadow, and artifice, ambiguity, and increasing abstraction, to develop my own style of theatrical interior-scapes.

You can contact me at anne [at] luminousplayhouse [dot] com, or use this form.

—Anne Garland

Exhibition: “Paradise 3—Bedevilment” group show, Spring 2011, Proteus Gowanus, Brooklyn