On April 19, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York inaugurates the 2016 Roof Garden commission, a large-scale work by celebrated British artists Cornelia Parker.

The work, entitled Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) is installed on top of the museum, in the Roof Garden space which, in the past years, has accommodated site-specific works by Pierre Huyghe (2015), Dan Graham & Günther Vogt (2014), and Imran Qureshi (2013).

Cover image, Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker, installation view, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

MET Rooftop Commission 2014 by David Graham, image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

This year’s commission went to the British artist Cornelia Parker (1956) best-known for her large scale sculptural works and installations, which have been widely covered through solo exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, the Serpentine Gallery in London, and the The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; along with being included in the permanent collection of several major art museums, including Tate, MET, de Young Museum, MoMA, Centre Pompidou, and Victoria and Albert Museum.

Cornelia Parker, Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View, 1991, image © Cornelia Parker, courtesy of Tate

Cornelia Parker, Thirty Pieces of Silver, 1888-9, image © Cornelia Parker, courtesy of Tate

Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), on view from April 19 through October 31, looks like a real house, although reduced in size, but it is actually a sort of cinema set, an illusion composed of two facades attached to a scaffolding.

In conceiving her work, indeed, Cornelia Parker was inspired by some very “cinematographic” archetypes, namely the paintings of Edward Hopper, the traditional American red barns, and the sinister house Alfred Hitchcock imagined as the perfect family abode for the disturbed character of Norman Bates in Psycho (1960), which was clearly inspired by Hopper’s painting House by the Railroad (1925).

The Bates family house in Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock (1960)

Stage photo of the Bates house seen from the back with the scaffolding which supports the fake facades

Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad, 1925, image courtesy of MoMA

This new iconic work by Parker combines several elements into one piece, the architectural reference to rural American (and British) architecture embodied by the barn, the visual contrast between the small red house and the Manhattan skyline, the quasi-real building made with pieces recovered from a real barn in the State of New York, the psychoanalytic theory of transitional (or comfort) objects used by children as a means to balance their imaginary and private universe with the fear for the outer reality (such as that epitomized by the security blanket of Linus Van Pelt), and the fascination with cinema, including those cultural cross-references between England and the United States so evident in the work of a successful expat like Alfred Hitchcock.

The disused red barn from which part of the pieces used in Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) were collected

Assembling the installation, image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Cornelia Parker, photo Jeff McMillan, Courtesy the artist and Tate

Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker, installation view, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

View of Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) by Cornelia Parker, image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cornelia Parker: Transitional Object (PsychoBarn)

MET – Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Roof Garden

April 19 – October 31, 2016