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2005 11-12 Ken Kagami 2006 02-03 Naoko Tamura 2006 03-04 Jon Widman 2006 05-06 Brian Fahlstrom 2006 08 Dean Sameshima 2006 09 11-12 Keita Suzuki 2006 10-11 Banks Violette / Gardar Eide Einarsson 2007 01-02 Annette Kelm /
Mark Roeder 2007 03-04 Gentaro Ishizuka 2007 06 Takeshi Murata 2007 09-10 Shinpei Kusanagi 2008 01-03 Mario Garcia Torres 2008 04-05 Kyoko Ishikawa 2008 05-06 Violet Hopkins

Banks Violette / Gardar Eide Einarsson

October 21 - November 18, 2006

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gallery.sora. is pleased to announce the debut solo exhibition in Japan of Norwegian-born, New York based artist Gardar Eide Einarsson as well as the debut of American-born, New York based artist Banks Violette. Each artist has been the included in numerous international museum exhibitions; Banks Violette’s work was recently featured in a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2005) as well as the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich and the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y Leon, Leon (all 2006). Gardar Eide Einarsson has participated in exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern, Bern (2005), Kunstwerke, Berlin (2004) as well as the Whitechapel Project Space, London (2003).

The gallery.sora. exhibition is a two-person show; while both artists deal with similar aesthetic issues and create work in sympathy, each has a distinct visual vocabulary and unique manner of presentation. Banks Violette works in the multiple media of sculpture, painting and drawing; his installations have also incorporated the use of soundtrack. Gardar Eide Einarsson makes paintings, wall text works and sculpture and has experimented in the media of theater, having staged the infamous “Unabomber” Theodore Kaczynski’s play Ship of Fools at the Swiss Institute, New York (2006).

Both artists appropriate the signs of subculture. Re-presented within what is understood as the neutral space of the gallery, the meaning of images referencing and directly drawn from punk, death metal and other supposedly subversive sub-cultures is complicated. Violette and Einarsson are interested in the actual possibilities that emerge when mediated imagery is “mis-read”; e.g. ritual murders carried out in response to and in participation in an actualized theater of Death Metal.

The gallery.sora. exhibition will afford the artists an opportunity to participate in a dialogue drawing upon the differences which inevitably emerge when artists from different backgrounds engage the same source material. This further complication opens the work of each artist to varied interpretations and, perhaps, a reading which may prompt action beyond the confines of the gallery space.