WESTPORT, CONN.- MoCA CT announces American Standard, Banks Violette’s first major solo exhibition since 2008. His austerely beautiful drawings, sculptures, video, and installation mix influences from postwar art, politics, and pop culture to evoke America’s rise and decline, its unique mix of pleasure and destruction. The exhibition of approximately 20 objects focuses on three extraordinary works, each presented in its own room: a massive American flag sculpture, a monumental gas station installation, and a haunting video. Together they form a layered narrative about American excess, its discontents, and unclear future.
The steel and electric light sculpture of the American flag resembles a worn-out road sign. Violette sees the flag not just as a national symbol but also as a reflection of the systems that constitute America as a sovereign nation, from its settler colonialist roots to its imperial present. His art often explores the psychological mingling of pleasure and pain which finds expression in the discussion of The United States — its splendor coupled with its abuses.
The salvaged and reassembled gas station is Violette’s first readymade artwork. It’s broken and decayed, but the fluorescent lights still glow, symbolizing the lingering energy of a past era of excess — the gleeful tradition of car culture and its debts coming due before our eyes.
To create a haunting projection of the winged horse from the old Tristar Pictures logo, Violette uses an antique method of holography, known as a Pepper’s Ghost illusion, once popular in stagecraft. The Pegasus appears frozen midair in a loop with its wings removed. This logo, tied to the neoliberal optimism of the Reagan and Thatcher era, recalls that economic belief system’s unfulfilled promises. Two decades later, the Tristar logo resurrects the quintessentially American phantasms of the film studio and the theme park.
In American Standard, Violette tells the story of an America caught in a cycle of reverence and decay, its symbols rendered threadbare by cycles of upheaval yet bound to a mythology of nationhood. The exuberant twentieth century lingers in the present despite a political, technological, and social ferment without precedent in its history. His art continues to challenge conventional aesthetics, blending visceral imagery with cultural critique.
Banks Violette lives and works in Ithaca, NY. He received his BFA from the School of the Visual Arts and his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including those at Museum Dhont-Dhaenens in Belgium; Kunsthalle Wien; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Kunsthalle Bergen, Norway; and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Violette’s works are held in the collections of major institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
I’m interested in imagery that exists as vectors for numerous intersecting, competing, and contradictory interpretations. Ideally, enough of those can be collected, arranged together, and aligned so those disparate vectors form a queasy gestalt, an aggregate portrait of a condition wherein interpretation is next-door-neighbor to complicity. — Banks Violette
