Hoping For Hardcore! Banks Violette's Exhibit Opens

image via historyofourworld.wordpress.com

_Banks Violette's first solo exhibit in Los Angeles is opening at Blum & Poe in Culver City tomorrow night, January 7th. His large scale, conceptual installations have been staggeringly astonishing in the past and this show should be no different. Here is a sculpture from his show at Gladstone Gallery in New York’s Chelsea last year.

His press release describes his work as being arrested in time: "Violette’s sculptural objects and installations function as elegant reminders of darker moments past and present." This is because his work is mostly minimalist in form, but made from a diversity of industrial materials like neon tubing, salt, resin, aluminum, powder-coated steel and glass. The result is a rather contemporary effect.

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image via slamxhype.com

His work has been described as Neo-Gothic, which emphasizes a rebellion against normality, and so it's no wonder his work is heavily influenced by subcultures like hardcore punk and drone metal bands. Violette has explored teenage suicide, ritual murder, political conspiracies, religious fanatics, and NASCAR iconography in the past, so he's well known for referencing a culture of excess, but in a minimalist light.

In British style magazine, Dazed and Confused, Francesca Gavin coined the New Gothic Art movement as "The Art of Fear" and quotes Violette saying:

_"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-equals-wrong' 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."

Here is an image from tomorrow night's show for an idea of what's to come...
Hope to see you there!