FIONA BANNER AKA THE VANITY PRESS
2024
Mixed media collage
18 x 12.5cm
Each image is for sale separately
These collages are taken from stills of the film, Pranayama Organ (2021), which features two full-scale inflatable military decoy aircrafts, a Typhoon and a Falcon. Stuck in a combative bind, they yearn for another future, as they play out an unrequited desire for intimacy not conflict, as the protagonists enact a dream of emasculating the tools of conflict, they recognise their own demise.
The film begins at dawn; the two aircrafts slowly inflate on the beach, coming to life like long- slumbering creatures. The setting then shifts to a grassy precipice, where two figures, including the artist, are dressed as fighter planes. Birdlike, human and automaton, the figures dance around each other in an absurd ritual of courtship and combat. The location of the film, a coastal area on the English Channel between a submerged petrified forest under the seabed, and an eroding cliff face, creates a fantastical, timeless setting that evokes alternative realities, climate change, universal conflict and shifting lands.
Fiona Banner (born 1966), also known as The Vanity Press is a British artist. Her work encompasses sculpture, drawing, installation and text, and demonstrates a long-standing fascination with the emblem of fighter aircraft and their role within culture and especially as presented on film. She is well known for her early works in the form of 'wordscapes', written transcriptions of the frame-by-frame action in Hollywood war films, including Top Gun and Apocalypse Now. Her work has been exhibited in prominent international venues such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York and Hayward Gallery, London. Banner was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 2002.
www.fionabanner.com