Artists Studio: Lucy Raven

ABOUT THE ARTISTS STUDIO With its exquisite melding of styles and mediums evident in the creative collaboration of Louis C. Tiffany and Associated Artists in the new Aesthetic Movement style, the Veterans Room represents the exuberance and innovation of exceptional young artisans approaching the decorative arts with a new vision.

Curated by jazz pianist, composer, and MacArthur Fellow Jason Moran, this new series features a diverse mix of contemporary classical, performative art, and an improvisational approach to jazz – all inspired by the exotic beauty of the newly-reopened space and the inventive spirit of the designers who conceived it. These cutting-edge interventions are created by dynamic artists and artistic pairings that harken back to the imagination present at the room’s inception, while testing the limits of the space and pushing their art forms in bold, new directions.

UPCOMING EVENTS: CAMILLE NORMENT AND CRAIG TABORN OCTOBER 16

RYAN TRECARTIN AND LIZZIE FITCH NOVEMBER 21

2016 ARTISTS STUDIO

IN THE NEWLY RESTORED VETERANS ROOM

Thursday, September 29 at 7:00pm & 9:00pm Friday, September 30 at 7:00pm & 9:00pm

LUCY RAVEN: TALES OF LOVE AND FEAR This performance is approximately forty-five minutes in length, performed without intermission.

SEASON SPONSORS

Support for Park Avenue Armory’s artistic season has been generously provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Harold and Mimi Steinberg Charitable Trust, the Howard Gilman Foundation, the Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, The Shubert Foundation, the Marc Haas Foundation, The Kaplen Brothers Fund, the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, the Leon Levy Foundation, the May and Samuel Rudin Family Foundation, and the Isak and Rose Weinman Foundation.

ABOUT THE WORK & ARTIST Tales of Love and Fear is a cousin of Curtains, a work that uses a similar anaglyph technique of separating right eye from left.

Curtains is a fragmented portrait of the work that goes into making Hollywood’s 3-D blockbusters, a process that, as it has shifted from production to post-production with the disappearance of celluloid, has created a global visual effects assembly line, where one film is broken up and sent piecemeal to the lowest bidder, then composited, or reassembled, back in Los Angeles. All visual effects are achieved painstakingly, frame by frame. 3-D conversion is especially labor intensive, as it requires the digital creation of a synthetic second-eye view for every frame in the film. Big-budget films—what the people in Curtains are working on—get distributed on identical hard drives to movie theaters all around the world. You can see Superman in 3-D in Beijing or London or Omaha or Kuala Lumpur, and you’re watching identical files played in megaplexes outfitted with a thousand new features that adhere to Digital Cinema Package, or DCP, standards.

While doing research for Curtains I was also writing a series of illustrated lectures. One of these, Low Relief, focuses on a formal relationship between bas-relief carvings and 3-D images. In that talk, I look at different histories of bas-relief carvings in the U.S. and in India—and each culture’s history of depicting spatial depth—as a way to discuss Hollywood’s outsourcing of the work converting films to 3-D, a process that’s high tech, but also on some level artisanal, done by hand, and subjective. After trips to post-production studios in Chennai, Mumbai, and Trivandrum, I went to central India to visit some of its oldest rock-cut temples. I came to feel that I was doing very deep background research, examining these ancient reliefs that emerged from the same geography where 3-D images are now being made in virtual space. There has always been a desire to see behind the flat image.

In a way, if Curtains is about labor then Tales is about relief. I mean bas-relief but also relief from work, and a real enjoyment in watching movies. When I started talking to Victoria Brooks, the curator at EMPAC, about what I could do there, I said I was interested in creating a unique instance of cinema. A cinema made for a single film, which contains a single image. I took a lot of 3-D stills on my trip to the ancient caves and temples, and in a way the one I chose isn’t anything special. I like that there’s no figure in it and I was very drawn to the architecture in this image. I consider Tales to be as much a movie as it is a kinetic sculpture performing the architecture of the theater it is in.

Tales of Love and Fear is comprised of a custom-built rig of counter-rotating platforms. A single stereoscopic photograph is split by the two projectors into the left and right eye perspective. Cones of light slowly revolve through the volume of the space connecting the photographic image to the projection apparatus. Using field recordings taken during a screening of a Bollywood horror movie in Mumbai, the surround soundtrack, designed by Paul Corley, transports the viewer back into this cinematic environment. By translating and overlaying this specific auditory experience onto the space, Tales of Love and Fear creates a composite architecture.

Despite what Oliver Wendell Holmes says in “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph” about the verisimilitude of the stereo photograph, you are not seeing into infinite depth with 3-D. The illusion works best when it is shallow; often that’s when you’re really grabbed by the solidity of forms within it. When I started looking back to the earliest patents for 3-D, I saw that many of them spoke about the illusion created in terms of relief. As it turns out, the etymology of anaglyph is from the ancient Greek for “work in low relief.”

Tales of Love and Fear was originally commissioned by Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. — Lucy Raven Lucy Raven lives in New York City. Her work has been included in exhibitions and screenings internationally including Curtains, Portikus, Frankfurt, Germany, and Hollywood Chop Riding, Yerba Buena, San Francisco (2014); Hammer Projects, the Hammer Museum, LA (2013); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2012); and 11 Rooms, Manchester International Festival, Manchester, United Kingdom (2011). She currently teaches at the Cooper Union School of Art and the School of Visual Arts in New York. She will present a solo exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries, London in December 2016.

ABOUT THE VETERANS ROOM “...the Armory, a once-crumbling landmark, has transformed itself into one of the world’s most sought-after venues for performance, music, and supersized art projects. And in a sense, the Veterans Room, of all the Armory’s opulent reception rooms, has the deepest spiritual kinship with a work of contemporary art, the feel of an installation by a young collective whose members were reacting to one another and making it all up as they went along.”

– The New York Times The Veterans Room is among the most significant surviving interiors of the American Aesthetic Movement, and the most significant remaining intact interior in the world by Louis C. Tiffany and Co., Associated Artists. This newly formed collective led by Tiffany included some of the most significant American designers of the 19th century at early stages of their very distinguished careers: Stanford White, Samuel Colman, and Candace Wheeler among them. The design of the room by these artisans was exotic, eclectic, and full of experimentation, as noted by Decorator and Furnisher in 1885 that “the prepondering styles appear to be the Greek, Moresque and Celtic, with a dash of Egyptian, the Persian and the Japanese in the appropriate places.”

A monument of late 19th-century decorative arts, the Veterans Room is the fourth period room at the Armory completed (out of 18). The revitalization of the room responds to the original exuberant vision for the room’s design, bringing into dialogue some of the most talented designers of the 19th and 21st centuries – Associated Artists with Herzog & de Meuron, Platt Byard Dovell White Architects, and a team of world-renowned artisans and experts in Tiffany glass, fine woodworking, and decorative arts.

The revitalization of the Veterans Room follows Herzog & de Meuron’s design approach for the Armory building, which seeks to highlight the distinct qualities and existing character of each individual room while interweaving contemporary elements to improve its function. Even more so than in other rooms at the Armory, Herzog & de Meuron’s approach to the Veterans Room is to amplify the beauty of the room’s original vision through adding contemporary reconstructions of lost historic material and subtle additions with the same ethos and creative passion as the original artisans to infuse a modern energy into a harmonious, holistic design.

The room’s restoration is part of an ongoing $210-million transformation, which is guided by the understanding that the Armory’s rich history and the patina of time are essential to its character, with a design process for the period rooms that emphasizes close collaboration between architect and artisan.

____________________________________________________________________________________________________ The restoration and renovation of the Veterans Room was made possible by The Thompson Family Foundation, Inc., Susan and Elihu Rose, Charina Endowment Fund, Lisa and Sanford B. Ehrenkranz, Almudena and Pablo Legorreta, Assemblymember Dan Quart and the New York State Assembly, Liz and Emanuel Stern, Olivia and Adam Flatto, Kenneth S. Kuchin, R. Mark and Wendy Adams, American Express, Rebecca Robertson and Byron Knief, Amy and Jeffrey Silverman, the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Fund of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Anonymous (2).

Cover photo: James Ewing