Banks Violette: American Standard
SPRING 2025 EXHIBITION
March 15 – June 15, 2025
MoCA\CT presents American Standard, Banks Violette’s first major solo exhibition since 2008. The exhibition, on view from March 15 to June 15, 2025, will bring together approximately 20 works spanning drawing, sculpture, video, and installation.
The show, organized by the Visual Arts Advisory Committee with support from Rick Cooper and Ruth Mannes, will center on three extraordinary works, each installed in its own gallery: a massive steel-and-light American flag sculpture, a monumental gas station installation, and a haunting video projection. Together, these works will create a layered narrative that reflects on American excess, its discontents, and an uncertain future.
Violette’s American flag sculpture, resembling a worn road sign, will consider the flag not only as a national symbol but as a reflection of the systems that shape the United States, from its settler colonial origins to its imperial present. His first ready-made work—a salvaged and reassembled gas station—will appear broken and decayed, yet still illuminated, symbolizing the lingering glow of a culture built on speed, consumption, and excess.
A haunting projection of the winged horse from the Tristar Pictures logo will be created using an antique theatrical technique known as a Pepper’s Ghost illusion. The Pegasus, frozen midair and stripped of its wings, will recall the neoliberal optimism of the Reagan-era economy and its unfulfilled promises, resurrecting familiar American fantasies of cinema and spectacle.
In American Standard, Violette will tell the story of an America caught between reverence and decay—its symbols worn thin by cycles of upheaval yet tethered to a powerful mythology of nationhood. The exhibition will continue his practice of blending visceral imagery with sharp cultural critique.
Banks Violette lives and works in Ithaca, NY. He received his BFA from the School of the Visual Arts and his MFA from Columbia University. His work has been featured in major solo exhibitions worldwide and is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
“I’m interested in imagery that exists as vectors for numerous intersecting, competing, and contradictory interpretations… so those disparate vectors form a queasy gestalt, a portrait of a condition wherein interpretation is next-door-neighbor to complicity.” — Banks Violette
Organized by MoCA CT’s Art Advisory Committee: Pamela Hovland, Robin Jaffee Frank, Lisa Kereszi, Richard Klein, Kathryn Turley-Sonne and Lewis Dérogène. Frederic Cooper + Ruth Mannes initiated the exhibition.
Banks Violette: American Standard is made possible through the generosity of our sponsors William + Jodi Felton, Thomas Hofstetter / The Hofstetter Baron Group, Joyce Pauker, Russell Insurance Agency.
Photo of Banks Violette –– NR Magazine. Photographer: Jeton Bakalli. Stylist: Jungle Lin.
Photos by Jenna Bascom
