Banks Violette

The work of Banks Violette is something I first became aware of through Francesca Gavin’s 2008 book New Gothic Art (Gavin, 2008), and, although immediately taken by the work, I didn’t look much further into it from a contextual perspective until recently and, to be completely transparent, still have so much more to investigate besides the works that I’m currently familiar with.

It is from Violette’s combined use of steel, deep blacks, cool white lights and sound in his installation work that has informed my own approach to my degree show installation. I had the steel and the jet black ropes already in mind, and sound has been a key part of my practice from the outset, but the addition of the cool white light strips has been directly informed by various photographs I’d seen from a number of exhibitions showing Violette’s work installed in their respective spaces. The two that I found especially interesting to me were installations from his 2006 show While Interwoven Echoes Drip into a Hybrid Body (Maureen Paley: Banks Violette, no date), which was shown at Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zürich, and his 2007 shows in New York at Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Teams, which ran simultaneously (Haber, no date).

Conceptually, I have yet to identify a link between Violette’s work and my own beyond an interest in underground extreme heavy metal (Saatchi Gallery: Banks Violette, no date), but the aesthetic similarities are certainly there, and he is an artist that I will be investigating much further in my future practice.