"Towering above a platform of shiny black epoxy, more stage than plinth, the untitled 2005 installation occupied the better part of a black-painted gallery at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, which had commissioned the work on the heels of the artist's star turn at the 2004 Whitney Biennial. Against the black ground, its crystalline beams appeared at once physically overwhelming and insubstantial, conjuring a fossilized ruin, a spectral trace, an X-ray revealing a hidden wound."
"I was drawn in then, as I am now, by the work's doomy elegance: This was art for the end of the world, which is what it often felt like to be a teenage malcontent during the two-term death cult that was the presidency of George W. Bush. As I circled Violette's installation, I became aware for the first time of looking at a work of contemporary art,"
An untitled 2005 installation by Banks Violette reproduces a skeletal, burned-out church cast in salt and polyurethane atop a shiny black epoxy platform. The crystalline beams stand against a black-painted gallery ground, appearing both physically overwhelming and insubstantial, conjuring fossilized ruin, spectral trace, and an X-ray-like hidden wound. The work was modeled on the charred remains of the twelfth-century Fantoft Stave Church in Bergen, Norway, linked to a string of early-1990s church burnings by members of the Norwegian black metal scene. The piece connects aesthetics of apocalypse and youth disaffection to violent, ideologically fraught backstory involving Varg Vikernes.
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