December 18, 2021–January 14, 2022
Open Wednesdays and Thursdays, 3–6pm, and by appointment
$5-20 suggested donation, 100% goes towards paying the artists
Proof of vaccine (or COVID-19 tests taken within 48 hrs) & masks will be required for entry.
Programs
Saturday, December 18; 5–10:30pm
Opening reception with Bullshit Detector vs Evicshen vs Gargoyle Madrigal
Brutal Sound Effects Festival #92: Collision Stories (Day/Bachmann/Gendreau/Jones) (record release)----Medicine Cabinet-----Midmight----Kanoko Nishi & Wobbly----4ft Owl----Birdspanker----Earth Jerks
Saturday, January 8; 8–10:30pm: Brutal Sound Effects Festival #93
Vaux Flores (NY)----Fluorescent Grey----SubStation6----Gustavo Pastre----Blood of Chhinnamastika----Multifungi (NY)----Moe the Vot
Friday, January 14; 8–10:30pm: Brutal Sound Effects Festival #94
Rubber (() Cement Solid City State installation and performance----Tom Djll----EKG (Ernst Karel + Kyle Bruckmann)----Temoleh----Last Paintings in Mazurka Mantis (Cooper/Roberts)----Decision/Fatigue----Ian Harding
Bonnie Banks, ubiquitous and elusive, has expanded the auspices of visual and sonic art for over two decades. Determinedly detailed, Banks’ paintings and drawings range in size from a playing card to a theater-filling backdrop. Some are shocking in their copious, rainbow-bomb-color, others in brutal, futuristic, black-and-white. All capture the viewer in a scene just this side of placeable, where your eyes can likely find what they want to—a city built from recycled stereo components, an ancient vessel teetering over rapids, a schema for future machines, a glistening new species. – Maureen P. Klier
Bonnie Banks provides an inexhaustible cast of monstrous characters veering from the humanoid to the reptilian and beyond. In a distinct graphic style – equal parts Jack Kirby and Goya –detailing every twist and fold of its creatures’ uncanny anatomies and records their mysterious behavior in the deepest caverns of imagination. – Mark Flood
BonBan is the only soul alive who’s successfully negotiated an agreement with dozens of artists that states they must wake up every weekend morning before 9 o’clock to eat pancakes, perform, not smoke indoors, and get along... I’ve always introduced [Bonnie Banks] to my friends as a “garbage whisperer, circa other century/s”- a title BonBan gave to himself, or herself, to something that is ambiguously attached to It, around the time we first met backstage… Then there were rooms filled with handcrafted costumes, banners, props, set designs and stacks of analog tape packed with alien songs telepathically intercepted from those odd-looking creatures that roam the depths of the Mariana trench. It eventually graduated into a cottage industry of homemade cassettes, VHS tapes, CDRs, LPs, archaic texts and illustrations… About 15 or 20 years ago, misfits and discarded souls would begin taking the pilgrimage to Northern California to not only meet BonBan and attempt to soak up whatever electricity it was transmitting, but to join a peripheral traveling carnival, which has been intermittently traversing the outer fringes of society since around the time that space shuttle exploded on live TV... But you should be extremely careful how you breathe while inspecting this folklore. If BB manifests from the page like an angry, throat sucking incubus and vacuums your wisdom teeth straight from your mouth when your eyes are focused on one of the BonBan creatures, don’t say I never warned you. – Alan Bishop
No one was certain about how the body would heal up. When he spoke for his needs, everyone leaned in to hear the whistle whispers. Hissing fuss brings in an engineer to help out with the metal orthopaedic implants. The particles of steel and correcting plastic were insisted on. Caretakers brought in all the favorite movies they would watch together on old VHS. Classics and some European-centric movies. Some golf highlights from the past were too degraded but still kept nearby. Always the white disc, his silver moon spool of movie tape. This is the Moon to his Earth. Closest friend and confidant, wise and ready to play forward the best experiences of a wonderful life. – Bonnie Banks, excerpt from “The VHS Moon Crimes of the Toilet Paper Tube Werewhistler”
