ERRTH CALLS: COMA WALLS, KENSPECKLE XEDUSAE, HAUSTORIAL GROTESQUES, AND BUTYL BALLET PANTY BRICKS - Bonnie Banks (Art Book)

Bonnie Banks, ubiquitous and elusive, has expanded the auspices of visual and sonic art for over three decades. Determinedly detailed, Banks’s 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. Some of the two-dimensional works read almost as sculptures, given the electric fizz of Banks’s stylized black lines, while many of the sculptures are also sound machines, costumes, furniture, and sets—used in performances by collaborators like Rubber (() Cement, Commode Minstrels in Bullface, Spider Compass Good Crime Band, and Scummerai; and at Banks’s foundational Bay Area (and beyond) recurring series Or