Fiona Banner

Printed Matter Inc., New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Fionna Banner aka The Vanity Press is a British artist whose diverse body of work captures sculpture, drawing, installation and text. Perhaps her most persistent motif, however, is that of the fighter jet, as is the case in the present work, Blinder, in which Banner hand blows and shapes the neon herself into this recognizable image. The manual nature of her process as well as the resulting imperfections inherent to the artist's manipulations, ultimately reveals the unwieldly physicality of the material itself, standing in stark contrast to the factory made neon signs that permeate most urban landscapes. Banner first starting working with neon over a decade ago and the medium has remained an important aspect of her practice. She says these neon works, “reflect a continuing struggle to control the medium - the language if you like - and that reflects the struggle to control meaning.”

Blinder is part of a larger series of neons of different types of fighter jets. It was born out of Banner’s series All the World’s Fighter Planes, a compilation of found newspaper images representing every type of fighter aircraft in commission anywhere in the world. The taxonomy of fighter plane nicknames such as Cobra, Moby Dick, Sea Stallion, Black hawk, Tomcat suggests ubiquitous associations with predatory animals or forces of nature, capturing the deadly power and efficacy of these manmade machines. The collection was reproduced in Banner’s All the World Fighter Planes, 2004, published by The Vanity Press in 2004 and updated in 2006.