Introduction to the work of Camille Norment:

The body is a site where various forms of knowledge converge.

This knowledge is a manifestation of the information that the body has gathered, conscious and unconsciously, in a reckoning with its sensory experiences, creating our sensory knowledge spaces. These spaces situate themselves like a reality extracted from science-fiction and placed into our realm to tell its version of our stories.

Camille Norment’s multi-media work is concerned with the way the body is inscribed with meaning through its negotiation with its surroundings, and with a narrative logic that likens itself to magical-realism and science fiction. As such, it engages the viewer as a physical and psychological participant in the work through its negotiations with architectural, optical illusory, sonic, and technically interactive environments and objects. While highly concerned with aesthetic experience, the work simultaneously spans the thresholds of the social, the political, and the formal.
With emphasis on manipulating the visual and sonic perceptual realms, Camille is occupied with the tensions created by contradictory sensory experiences. She often evokes the uncanny through her manipulation of common experiences such as looking in the mirror and not seeing a reflection, or presents sensual experiences that seek to treat the entire body as a sensory organ, such as sound that can be ‘seen’ or felt by the body rather than heard by the ears.

In a discussion of ambient sonic experience and contemporary culture, David Toop, in Ocean of Sound, acknowledges ”a heightening of sensation” in the 21st Century; sensations mediated and emphasized by a convergence of sensory phenomena which tantalize our basic sensory perceptions. And while sensory perception is still most often taken for granted given its de facto role in our lives, in the work of Camille Norment, it is an emphasized point of entry to a larger discourse on the subjective, cultural experience of the bodies that encompasses it. She filters physical perception through cultural experience, stimulating the body’s sensory knowledge spaces; knowledge that in turn informs the subjectivity of the individual and social self.

The extensive international fine arts exhibition credits include the The Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece (2007), Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo, Norway; 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.
She is currently preparing for upcoming solo exhibitions in New York and Berlin.

Camille’s work has been written about in periodicals such as Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, a feature in The Wire Magazine, and numerous other international texts.

African-American artist Camille Norment was born in 1970 in Silver Spring, Maryland . She has lived and worked in New York City for 12 years, recently relocating to Europe in 2004. Camille holds Masters Degrees in Fine Arts and in Interactive Telecommunications, a technology arts discipline, and has held the title of Professor of Art and Technology at Malmö University’s School of Art, Culture, and Communication in Sweden.

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