Loony Park

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 dis-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.

Random Joy, 2019
confetti cannon CO2, confetti, lights, random numbers generator that determines the interval between the explosions

Production: Contemporary Locus
Curator: Paola Tognon
Project Supervisor: Elisa Bernardoni
Producer: Francesca Ceccherini
Press Manager: Maddalena Bonicelli
Day sound: Aldo Lanzini
Night sound: Path Festival
Photography: Mario Albergati, Skymindimages
Video: Andrea Giannone
Gallerie Mercatali, Verona, 2019