Il Giardino dei Lauri and the Municipality of Città della Pieve are proud to announce an innovative exhibition by world-renowned artist Banks Violette taking place at the Museo Civico Diocesano di S. Maria dei Servi from June 11th to August 21st 2011.
The solo show, curated by Benjamin Godsill, is a continuation of the contemporary art projects undertaken by Il Giardino dei Lauri.
Brooklyn-based artist Banks Violette – who is included in the “Il Giardino dei Lauri Collection” - is renowned in the art world for creating situations and installations that draw on uncanny examples of the ordinary to spectacular end. He creates and repurposes images, films, structures, and objects that are full of established cultural signifiers yet totally empty of empirical meaning to endow these seemingly known forms with new possibilities. Crafting objects and images ― be they bits of film, abandoned rock-and-roll instruments, vehicles, billboards, or stage-sets ― Violette engages with iconography that is always already exhausted and over-determined in a process he describes as “visual strip mining”. It is from these ashes of signification, of meaning making, from whence his innovative artistic language emerges.
For his presentation at the Museo Civico Diocesano di S. Maria dei Servi, Violette responds directly to the space, filling the historic white volume of the deconsecrated, 14th century church with sculptures that are in specific dialog with the setting. Directly engaging with the legacies of minimalist art making and popular culture, Violette’s constructions ― in aluminum, fluorescent light, black cable, and other repurposed indusrial materials ― combine to create an almost stage-like setting for a performance that has yet to happen and never will. Manifesting themselves as walls of light, an ode to Hollywood-style storybook-endings, and the post-victorian beauty of a deconstructed chandelier, the works by Violette in the setting of the church will together form a new type of altar. For this installation Violette is working in discordant harmony with the imposing space, both resisting and acquiescing to its past and present condition, creating a new history while commenting on the site’s specific past.
Banks Violette (1973, Ithaca, New York) is one of contemporary art's most heralded young voices. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide and he is included in some of the most important and influential public and private collections around the globe. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Bergen Kunsthall, Norway; the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; La Conservera Centro de Arte Contemporaneo, Ceuti, Spain; and Museum Dhont-Dhaenens, Deurle, Belgium. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Seattle Art Museum; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Palais de Tokyo, Paris, among many others.
