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: RYAN TRECARTIN AND LIZZIE FITCH NOVEMBER 21
2016 ARTISTS STUDIO
IN THE NEWLY RESTORED VETERANS ROOM Sunday, October 16 at 5:00pm & 7:00pm
CAMILLE NORMENT & CRAIG TABORN Causes and Cures: Music for Glass Armonica and Excited Piano Strings 5:00pm Glass Irony God
7:00pm Cause Cure
About the Program
Thousands of years ago, the vibration of the excited, taut string was used to unite music with mathematics, after which followed a structured relation of music to the divine and to pathology. When invented by Benjamin Franklin in 1761, the sound of the glass armonica was revered as divine, and even used for hypnosis and healing. Not soon after, the instrument became a focus of controversy that resulted in it being outlawed for fear of the power of is voice over the body. Today, emerging out of a complex history of music and social control, vibrating objects, bodies, and spaces resonate throughout science and music, dissolving boarders of sonic perception. Camille Norment and Craig Taborn immerse themselves within this sonorous environment relating the Aeolian harp to the piano board, teasing electronic feedback into analog tone…abrasive tonality…sympathetic vibration. Instrumentation includes glass armonica, electronics, and manipulated piano strings.
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 ARTISTS Multimedia artist Camille Norment was born and raised in Silver Spring, Maryland and currently lives and works in Oslo, Norway. The breadth of her educational history from Comparative Literature and Art History to Masters in both Fine Arts and Interactive Telecommunications, in addition to years of studying music helped shape the innovative and versatile artist that she is today. Her work is preoccupied with investigating social phenomena through the cultural experience of sound, particularly instances of sonic and social dissonance, and sound as a force over the body, mind, and society.
and her work has been broadcast in radio features including NPR in the U.S., Norway’s NRK radio, and the UK’s BBC.
Norment was selected to represent Norway with solo project for the Nordic pavilion in the Venice Biennial, 2015. Accompanying the well-received sculptural sonic installation, the project featured her ensemble the Camille Norment Trio with herself on glass armonica and electronics, Håvard Skaset on electric guitar, and Vegar Vårdal on Norwegian Hardanger Fiddle. Each of the instruments were simultaneously revered and feared or even outlawed at various points in their histories. The visceral atmospheres the ensemble produces resonate through a tantalizing union of the instruments’ voices and their paradoxical cultural histories. Also featured were other renowned performers including David Toop and vocalist Sofia Jernberg.
His work lives on the imaginary boundary between improvisation and composition as well as between tradition and innovation. He creates pieces that seek to personalize and extend the tradition of jazz and improvised performance that has been defined by luminaries such as Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Muhal Richard Abrams, Roscoe Mitchell, and others. He has been performing piano and electronic music in the jazz, improvisational, and creative music scene for twenty years. He has experience composing for and performing in a wide variety of situations including jazz, new music, electronic, rock, noise, and avant garde contexts.
In 2016, Norment produces artwork and performance for the venues including the Montreal Biennial; the Koch-Muziris Biennial in Kochi, India; a solo exhibition and new composition for performance in the Festspillene Festival in Bergen; and a commissioned performance for the Park Avenue Armory in New York amongst other new contributions. Amongst several permanent public artworks, Norment was commissioned a permanent sound installation for the Henie Onstad Art Center (2011). The extensive international exhibition and performance credits also include: Jazzhouse, Copenhagen (2016); Lisboa Soa (2016); an outdoor surround sound broadcast feature at Art Basel Miami (2015); Ultima Contemporary Music Festival (2015); exhibition and performance in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); a commissioned artwork and performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Liste Young Art Fair (2009); the Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece (2007); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; the Charlottenborg Fonden, Copenhagen, Denmark; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA.; the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, NY; UKS Gallery, Oslo, Norway; the Bildmuseet, in Umeå, Sweden, and radio broadcast in the Venice Biennial, Venice, Italy. Norment’s work has been written about in periodicals such as Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, Kunst Kritikk, Aftenposten, a feature in The Wire Magazine, and numerous other international texts. Camille Norment has been featured in several recordings
Composer/pianist/electronic musician Craig Taborn was born and raised in Golden Valley, Minnesota and currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. While studying at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Craig had the good fortune to work in the illustrious Detroit jazz community performing and studying with such luminaries as Marcus Belgrave, Harold McKinney, Kenn Cox, and Francisco Mora Catlett.
He has played and recorded with many luminaries in the fields of jazz, improvsed music and electronic music including Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Tim Berne, John Zorn, Steve Coleman, Dave Holland, Vijay Iyer, David Torn, Chris Potter, Susie Ibarra, Carl Craig, Dave Douglas, Meat Beat Manifesto, Larry Klein, Rudresh Manhatappa, Mats Gustafson, and more. Taborn is a Doris Duke Artist, a Civitella Rainieri Fellow, and a Shifting Foundation Fellow and was recently voted the Keyboardist of the Year 2016 by the Jazz Journalists Association. His solo piano album Avenging Angel (ECM Records) was named one of top 10 albums of 2011 by many publications including The New York Times. His 2013 trio album Chants also appeared on many top 10 lists. Daylight Ghosts, a new album of compositions for electric and acoustic 4-piece ensemble, will be released in early 2017 on ECM records.
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