LOONY PARK. NORMA JEANE

LOONY PARK. NORMA JEANE
site specific installation
curated by Paola Tognon, a Contemporary Locus production
on the occasion of Art Verona 15th edition

11st-12nd-13rd October 2019
Gallerie Mercatali 
Viale del Lavoro, Verona IT (PalaExpo parking)

Loony Park is a site-specific installation created by Norma Jeane for Mercatali di Verona (IT), a dys-functional and anti-participatory project that offers the visitor an estranging experience within a strategy that involves the party-making dimension and its rites. Realized for the 15-years-old Art Verona, Loony Park is a large site-specific installation that welcomes the individual into a dilated experience: by day an abandoned amusement park, slumbering and surreal, by night a machine that pumps sound, lights, rhythms and prospects in which the human being can move at the machines’ tune. Matter and food, darkness and light, movement and immobility transform the space and its gigantic and solitary ogival architecture into an experience in which the glamour of art and the shininess of entertainment stratify like the forgotten but representative remains of a party that has been, that will be or that may never be. 
As usual in Norma Jeane’s installations, nothing is left to chance and nothing is predefined. One of her goals is to create oblique insights that interrupt the linear course of events as well as physical, mental and temporal disorientation and unexpected reflections that break the continuity of our habits. 
Behind her customary pseudonym – that of Norma Jeane – her work features a perturbing poetry in which the visitor finds him or herself in the condition of being able to observe but not to act, or, on the contrary, to be the conscious author of the disturbance proposed by the artist. Using site-specific installations - that often can be modified by the users, high-tech structures that create extreme acoustic or light conditions or using surveys based on the collection of data and shared experience - Norma Jeane reacts to the contemporary by creating physical and mental spaces of transgression, of restless melancholy, of sidereal solitude. 
During the night-time cycle of this improbable Loony Park, the thought-out cooperation with Path Festival and the insertion of ArtVerona receptive moments also come into play in the hybridization and indifference typical of Norma Jeane’s poetics, creating an equivocal platform that is dys-functional with regard to any expectation: that of the clients, that of the visitors or that of the musicians, or that of the roundabout attendants, of the operators, of the curators or of the producers. Within this logic, Norma Jeane is also each one of them.

PROGRAM:
Fri. 11st October
Loony Park opening: h 7.30 pm
Loony Park & Path Festival for ArtVerona - Party: from 9 pm to 02 am*
Sat. 12nd October
Loony Park: from 10 am to 8 pm 
Loony Park & Path Festival for ArtVerona: from 11 pm to 02 am*
Sun. 13rd October
Loony Park: from 10 am to 7 pm 
Free entrance
 

Norma Jeane 
NJ was born in Los Angeles, the city in which Marilyn Monroe died on the night between August 4th and 5th of the year 1962. By taking on the identity of someone else, by renouncing the connotation of a specific gender and by contemporarily creating a proliferation of personalities, NJ produces infinite ‘cut and paste’ versions of a person, in which characteristics that transcend every possible existence coexist. She/He is a body-less artist, without a personal biography that might extend beyond her/his artistic resume.

Path Festival is an avant-garde music festival, promoted by the Morse association, which since 2014 has brought some of the most interesting proposals of the contemporary music scene to the city of Verona, with a predilection for new languages ​​linked to experimentation in the electronic field.