Banks Violette - Contemporary Art Part II New York Tuesday, November 9, 2010 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance

    Team Gallery, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Cosmic Wonder, July 15 - November 5, 2006

  • Catalogue Essay

    New York-based artist Banks Violette is known for his minimalist sculptures and severe black and white color palette. The present lot demonstrates his interest in creating art that conveys not only visual interest, but auditory stimulation as well. Violette’s pieces often mimic sleek sound stages, but with razor-sharp edges and a Gothic sensibility. He is generally influenced by angst, violence, and nightmares, inspirations which are manifested in this piece’s jarringly stark appearance. Even the simple white panels feel arrestingly bare and imposing rather than light and serene.
     
    The black platform with the two flanking screens evokes a small-scale private concert arena, in which the viewer is invited to experience the interaction of sight and sound on a more intimate scale.
    I’m interested in a visual language that’s over-determined, exhausted, or just over-burdened by meaning. The heavy-handed one-to-one of ‘black-equalswrong’ is incredibly interesting to me—less as something that has a meaning in itself, but more in how those visual codes can somehow become reanimated. That’s constant throughout my work. All those images are like zombies—they’re stripped of vitality, yet sometimes they get life back in them … and. like zombies, usually something goes wrong when they wake up again.
    Banks Violette
    (Francesca Gavin, “The Art of Fear,” Dazed & Confused, volume 2, issue 66, October 2008, p. 157)

226

Sonic Reducer

2005
Bonded salt, salt, polyurethane, polymer medium, ash, epoxy, wood, galvanized steel and steel hardware.
Overall installation dimensions: 115 x 115 x 115 in. (292.1 x 292.1 x
292.1 cm).

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $116,500

Contemporary Art Part II

9 November 2010
New York