BEXHILL ON SEA.- The De La Warr Pavilion presents Buoys Boys, an exhibition incorporating a new site-specific sculptural performance by leading British artist Fiona Banner. Inspired by the Pavilion’s situation overlooking the sea, the immersive installation takes place both inside and outside the gallery, and is a play on digital versus material experiences, whilst continuing the artist’s ongoing interest in conflict and language.
In Buoys Boys, Banner references the limitations of language through a series of full stop sculptures or “anti-texts”. The artist has previously rendered full stops in 3D; here they are massively blown up, in scale but also literally, as they take the form of helium-filled inflatables. Their mammoth forms, in a variety of typefaces, Capitalist, Courier, Bookman etc, float from the roof of the Pavilion in two happenings, for the opening of Buoys Boys, and for the closing of Hasting’s ROOT 1066 International Festival.
Banner is particularly interested in how historical events become fictionalised over time. Buoys Boys is part of ROOT 1066, in which artists loosely respond to the cultural and linguistic legacies of the Norman invasion.
Said the artist, “The full stop inflatables have the English Channel as backdrop. They are big black empty texts in one way, just floating buoys in another. There’s something beautiful but also dark about the Channel. Britain was invaded across this stretch of water in 1066, the same stretch that today is both a route of attempted refuge and the increasingly contentious divider between Britain and mainland Europe. The black abstract forms are markers within language but also markers within space and time, sometimes they seem absurd, comical, or even surreal.”
The film documenting the performance is set to a soundtrack based on the 1966 pop hit Snoopy vs The Red Baron derived from Banner’s rearrangement of the song with musician Viv Albertine for The Exquisite Corpse will Drink the Young Wine, organised by Banner at the Welsh Congregational Chapel in London in 2012.
Full stops also manifest in Ha-ha, a panoramic window installation spanning the full length of the gallery, placing sculptural peepholes, or illusory ‘buoys’ on the distant seascape.
Banner also works under the moniker of The Vanity Press, and for Buoys Boys presents a series of films and books relating to this experimental publishing activity. Alongside this the artist shows large-scale poster works referencing two of her live performances, including Snoopy Vs The Red Baron and the world premiere of Orson Welles’ unrealised screenplay for Heart of Darkness, which she staged and directed in 2012 on board the Roi de Belges..
Fiona Banner (b. Merseyside, UK, 1966) lives and works in London. The artist was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002. Selected solo exhibitions include: Scroll Down and Keep Scrolling, IKON, Birmingham (2015) touring to Kunsthalle Nurnberg (2016); FONT, Frith Street Gallery, London (2015); Wp Wp Wp, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (2014); Mistah Kurtz – He Not Dead, PEER, London (2014); The Vanity Press, Summerhall, Edinburgh (2013); Unboxing, The Greatest Film Never Made, 1301PE Gallery, L.A (2012); Harrier and Jaguar The Duveen Galleries Commission, Tate Britain (2010); The Naked Ear, Frith Street Gallery, London (2010); The Bastard Word, Power Plant, Toronto (2007) and Art Now Room, Tate Gallery, London (1998). Notable group exhibitions include: Postscript: Writing after Conceptual Art, MCA Denver (2012) and That Was Then... This Is Now, MoMA, New York (2008).
