Psycho at the Met

Cornelia Parker installs a PsychoBarn on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum

Parker incorporates the blood-red siding, wood floors, whitewashed posts, and corrugated steel roofing from an old barn in Transitional Object (PsychoBarn). Even in their transformed state, these materials retain evidence that the barn spent a century as part of a farm in upstate New York. The title of Parker’s work alludes to the psychoanalytic theory of transitional objects used by children to help negotiate their self-identity as separate from their parents. The piece flickers between the physical reality of the barn and the cinematic fiction of the house, bringing up their respective ties to comfort and discomfort. Neither entirely real nor completely false, it vacillates unnervingly between its identities.