1301PE is pleased to announce the one-person exhibition of British artist Fiona Banner.
The exhibition will present the American release of Fiona Banner's epic book THE NAM and new sculptures.
THE NAM is a 1000 page all text flick book comprised of six well known Vietnam War films: Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter, Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Hamburger Hill and Platoon. Banner describes the films in their entirety, in a play by play manner, splicing them together as if there were no beginning, middle or end. In the grand tradition of history painting, Banner has compiled many sources to create a sweeping epic. In this case, Banner has used six Hollywood movies as credible source material. The reader/viewer is left with Hollywood's fictionalization of historical events. THE NAM having been called "unreadable", Banner launched into Trance, a 20-hour, twenty-two tape, books on tape version in which Banner's reading turns the book into a hypnotic stream of words.
"In 1997 Banner exhibited a neon work in the shape of a full stop (a period), 'The smallest neon in the world'. Following this she has made a group of enormously enlarged full stops carved in polystyrene. Although varying in size from about two to four and a half foot high they are all enlarged to scale from a variety of such fonts as Times, New Century, McGill Sans, Avant Garde and Swing. They each have the same point size, 1800 pt, but the expanded scale reveals the curious anomaly latent within an apparently universal and uniform symbol."
Fiona Banner was born in 1966 and studied at Goldsmith's College of Art, London. She lives and works in London. A selection of her solo exhibitions include City Racing, London, 1993; View Room, Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York, 1995; Frith Street Gallery, London, 19997, Galerie Barbara Thumm, Berlin, 1998, Tate Gallery, London, 1999. Banner's work has been exhibited inn a number of group exhibition including Institute of Cultural Anxiety, ICA, London, 1994; General Realease:Young British Artists, XLVI Venice Biennale, 1995; Spellbound, Hayward Gallery, London, 1996; Blueprint, De Appel, Amsterdam, 1997; Urban Legends – London, Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 1997.
