Banks Violette: Untitled

The Whitney has commissioned Banks Violette, whose work was featured in the 2004 Biennial, to create a new project for his first solo museum exhibition. A multimedia sculptural installation with a sound component, the work reimagines the notion of the romantic sublime through narratives drawn from popular culture. The installation includes music by Snorre Ruch, part of an insular music subculture called Black Metal, whose ethos embraces nihilism, theatrical morbidity, aggression, and violence. The central sculptural component evokes a Minimalist representation of the ruined skeleton of a church, referencing both the romantic iconography of painters such as Caspar David Friedrich and the imagery of a Black Metal album cover. Cast in salt, the ghostlike church skeleton transcends the familiar image of romantic decay, and reinvests it with meaning both through the formal seduction of the piece and the viewer’s interaction with it in the space.

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Banks Violette: Untitled