Camille Norment: Artist Lecture
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Plexus - Untitled (bellhorn) (2022). Dynamic sonic feedback and sculpture installation. Dia Art Foundation Commission and exhibition view. photo / Bill Jacobson Studio
Abstract
Sound is a physical force that connects everything in its omnidirectional path through expanding waveforms of energy that touch and move through all. Similarly, Camille Norment's work utilizes sonic perspectives to simultaneously navigate through various concepts and art forms, including installation, performance, drawing, sculpture, and composition, into unified wholes. In this presentation, Norment will offer insight into this expansive approach to her art and music practice through the dynamic framework of "cultural psychoacoustics."
In favor of aesthetic experience, the lecture will incorporate performance, image, speech, sound, and music.
Biography
The work of multimedia artist Camille Norment is internationally renowned in both contemporary art and music. Her extensive contributions span both fields in multiple forms, including installation, composition, sculpture, drawing, and performance. Norment's expended practice creates new experiences emerging from sonic narratives, combining the somatic and cognitive. In 2023, Norment exhibited as the Festspillkunstner, presenting Gyre, a project that united all four of the main galleries of Bergen Kunsthall into a single sonic experience that focused her continued exploration of sonic cycles, socio-historical repetitions, paradox, and evolutionary feedback. She simultaneously premiered a new ensemble composition commissioned by Festspillene i Bergen (FiB), which was performed in Håkonshallen. Camille Norment is the first person to have both exhibited as the Festspillkunstner and to have been commissioned to compose and perform in FiB simultaneously. The same year, she also premiered a newly commissioned performance for voice and feedback by the Munch Museum. The Dia Art Foundation, one of the world's most important art foundations, commissioned Norment for two large-scale installations for their Chelsea locations. This project, Plexus, was exhibited for nearly a year in 2022 to critical acclaim. Norment represented Norway in the 2015 Venice Biennial, the oldest, largest, and most prestigious of the art biennials. Her three-part solo project, Rapture, included an architectonic sound installation that occupied the entire pavilion, a series of performances, and a three-part publication. Rapture remains an iconographic work today. The contemporary music ensemble Camille Norment Trio was founded in 2010 and features the rare glass armonica, the hardingfele, and electric guitar as principal instruments alongside her live manipulation of feedback as a "ghost" fourth member, giving presence to a normally censored voice. Norment also served as Prorector of Research at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO) 2020-2023. Norment was the recipient of the prestigious Nam June Paik Award 2023, and in 2024, she received an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Bergen, School of Music, Art, and Design. The Norwegian and American artist was born in 1970 in Silver Spring, MD, USA.
