| The young British artist Fiona Banner is best known
for her "textscapes" - word pieces that make use of language
and its visual representation in printed text. Here, for her first solo
outing in New York, she offered an intelligent display of eight large
drawings, all of which reprised previous work. Seven of the drawing
as were actually precursors to a sculptural series that Banner showed
at London’s Tate Gallery in 1998, consisting of three-dimensional
periods - that punctuation mark to end all punctuation marks - realized
in different typefaces, blown up to 1,800 point size, using Styofoam.
The drawings are similarly large periods on coated Fabriani paper filled
in with densely worked pencil marks. The resulting shapes, which hover at the lower edge of the page, have a clean, sharp edge and a metallic, shimmering depth that seems the polar opposite of the sculptures’ near-weightless mass. Yet for there Minimalist sophistication, these drawings also summon up memories of childhood art-class coloring instructions. In New York, for instance, what appears to be a perfectly round form is made with circles inscribed within circles, while the almondesque Nuptial is filled in with cross-hatched basket-weave marks. For Face, by contrast, Banner let her marks expand to cover the whole page, creating a steely, almost mirrorlike appearance. The entire grouping was stapled to the walls, creating a beautiful assemblage in the gallery’s modest semi-industrial space; the hovering periods were reflected by the softly polished steel floor as if in a lake. The final drawing, This is it, is a takeoff on Banner’s best-known project The Nam. (To create that, she watched six movies about the Vietnam War, carefully notated their actions as words, and published the text as an editioned book). This time, she described the film The Deer Hunter from memory, using hand-outlined, filled-in letters to render the filmic action in text. At the left margin, which is justified, the letters are clean, dark and resolved; towards the right, the characters waver between dark and light, and the block of text fans out, growing paler and ragged-edged as though made hazier by memory - or projected at a slight angle on a home movie screen. This gives the piece, made from two glued-together sheets of paper a curiously sculptural presence. It adroitly incarnates the interplay - between language and image, or two-dimensionality and space - that characterizes Banner’s most interesting work. |
