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Monday, May 5, 2025 |
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Looped coyote projections haunt suburban decay in Banks Violette's new solo exhibition |
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The shows title is the same as that of Joseph Beuys famous 1972 performance (also known simply as Coyote).
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WASHINGTON, DC.- von ammon opened i like america and america likes me, a solo show by American artist Banks Violette. The project is primarily composed of moving image works: looped projections on transparent scrim which generate hologram-like specters in the gallery space. Recent sculpture and works on paper accompany the moving-image works.
Using footage sourced from Suburbia (1983, d. Penelope Spheeris), the main gallery space foregrounds two projections of the wild dogs that punctuate the movies plotline. These animals travel in packs through the movies neglected inner-suburban settinga stagnant community apparently coming undone alongside its derelict tract housing. The animals embody the myth of foreign elements corrupting a sacrosanct American idyll: the beloved archetype of the family dog is miscegenated and corrupted by the coyote, to return as a fearsome revenant-concerned citizens gleefully execute these mongrels via drive-by gunshot. The animalsfoils of the teenage squatters who anchor the dramarepresent the merry menace of counterculture descending upon a staid yet moribund twentieth century.
The two looped videos in the gallery are drained of color, soundtrack, backdrop and context. Slowed down to a crawl, they cross the screens in irresolute, stuttering loops. Using a stage illusion called pepper's ghost, commonly used in amusement parks and haunted houses, they seem to hang in midair like holograms or specters. A solitary shepherd dog slowly falls to its death, only to run and die again and again. While the end of the twentieth century promised us the synthesis of two worldsthe norms and traditions of the prior epoch dovetailing with high tech and globalizationthe two are evidently insoluble. New cultural and technological forms appear briefly, simply to degrade into novel vectors of loneliness, ennui, and rage.
The shows title is the same as that of Joseph Beuys famous 1972 performance (also known simply as Coyote). Meant to conjure the trauma inflicted on Germany in The Second World War, Beuys shamanistic pantomimeinvolving a living coyotefeels lifeless and chillingly silly in the context of its vaunted subject matter. Violettes pantomimes conjure a similarly haunting yet bathetic effect: thrilling cultural ferment and upheaval reduced to skips on the cultural record.
Banks Violette (b. 1973, Ithaca) lives and works in Ithaca, New York.
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