Banks Violette - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, May 15, 2008 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    Team Gallery, New York

  • Catalogue Essay

    Banks Violette’s ominous sculptural works function as semi-abstract signifiers for underlying systems of reality. In Boom Box, one finds motifs of heavy metal music, sub-culture behavior and youth excess, all themes which Violette repeatedly returns to in his artistic practice. The glossy black paint and lumpy stalagmite extensions rising atop the easily recognizable form of a boom box create a troubling suggestion which lacks the visual clues for resolution. The artist’s interest in the ways ideological commitment gives rise to tragedy, specifically among teenagers, highlights the dark underbelly of popular culture. Black Metal is particularly of interest to Violette. As a sub-cultural movement, the ethos of Black Metal represents an isolated paradigm of behavior where certain adherents lost their capacity to differentiate between acceptable conduct and those roles they had constructed which embraced aggressive, violent and anarchistic behavior. For Violette, “this practice of familiarizing events is not meant to make them acceptable (via desensitization) but rather to retain that multivalence.These are the chaotic systems that influence all our lives, the complicated, fluid and ambiguous flux of true human experience.”
    (S. Momin, “A Glancing Mirror:The ObscureTotal Idea,” Banks Violette, NewYork, 2005, p. 13)

102

Untitled (Boom Box)

2003

Epoxy resin, MDF, polyurethane, polystyrene, speakers and boom box.

12 1/4 x 7 7/8 x 7 1/4 in.(30 x 20 x 19 cm) left speaker; 12 3/8 x 9 7/8 x 6 in. (31.5 x 25 x 15.5 cm) boom box; 17 x 6 x 9 in. (43 x 15.5 x 23 cm) right speaker; 17 x 55 x 12 1/4. (43 x 140 x 31 cm) approximately installed.
This work is unique.

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Contemporary Art Part I

15 May 2008, 7pm
New York