highlights
4 May - 25 June 2017
Oslo Kunstforening
Camille Norment | DRAWING and SCULPTURE | 4 mai – 25 juni
Oslo Kunstforening
Camille Norment's oeuvre moves in the borderland between visual arts, sound and music using the sonic as a perspective through which to investigate cultural and social phenomena. Sound is a powerful force over the body, mind, and society. Norment’s work is particularly occupied with inter-relating relating states of sonic and social dissonance.
Tones that are abrasive or sound out of tune, social discontents and traumas, even magnets that refuse to connect to one another, can all constitute states of dissonance. Dissonance can be described as an unresolved space, a state of instability, but one that is also constantly shifting, and open for new possibilities.
In this exhibition, Camille Norment’s principle media are metal and ink on paper, and glass. She is mostly known for her sound installations and her performances on the glass armonica. Glass, and the force of vibration – be it a physical, sonic, social, or historical force – were also important parts of her large scale installation at the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
Norment leads us into the exhibition with an off-tune crystal bowl from the glass armonica that continuously overflows with water. It periodically emits sonic feedback, traces of a distant inaudible voice.
The new series of drawings made with iron filings drawn with magnets show simple forms, some reminiscent of music notation sheets, waveforms, or signal-noise. The work often repeats the logical, but closed system of Western music notation - a system in which “extra musicality” is denied entry - as a symbolic motif.
Some of the drawings manifest themselves in the shape of a scar, giving them a bodily reference. While a wound is a trauma or separation, the scar is what reconstitutes a whole. In Norment’s schema these scars are signifiers of dissonance - a transformation from noise, violence, and a wound into a scar. Dissonance in this way, becomes about healing, and the scar a trace of an event. In the face of current anxieties, there is also the question of the re-opening historical scars.
Another new series of glass sculptures take the form of melting bones. The skeletons belong to a small person, neither a child nor an adult, the gender is unclear. The glass objects reveal an ambiguity – fascination as well as discomfort, fragility and violence. The fact that they look as though they are melting make them alien in their continual transformation, frozen in a moment in the continuous cycle of a feedback loop.
Whether in drawing, sculpture, installation or sound, the focus in Camille Norment’s oeuvre is not necessarily the interest of pathology – even though the gendering of pathology features strongly in her work, but rather she looks at dissonance as a possible space of transformation, that can be used personally, culturally or politically.
The exhibition has been generously supported by Norsk Kulturråd and NBK.
Camille Norment | DRAWING and SCULPTURE | 4 mai – 25 juni
Oslo Kunstforening
Camille Norment's oeuvre moves in the borderland between visual arts, sound and music using the sonic as a perspective through which to investigate cultural and social phenomena. Sound is a powerful force over the body, mind, and society. Norment’s work is particularly occupied with inter-relating relating states of sonic and social dissonance.
Tones that are abrasive or sound out of tune, social discontents and traumas, even magnets that refuse to connect to one another, can all constitute states of dissonance. Dissonance can be described as an unresolved space, a state of instability, but one that is also constantly shifting, and open for new possibilities.
In this exhibition, Camille Norment’s principle media are metal and ink on paper, and glass. She is mostly known for her sound installations and her performances on the glass armonica. Glass, and the force of vibration – be it a physical, sonic, social, or historical force – were also important parts of her large scale installation at the Nordic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2015.
Norment leads us into the exhibition with an off-tune crystal bowl from the glass armonica that continuously overflows with water. It periodically emits sonic feedback, traces of a distant inaudible voice.
The new series of drawings made with iron filings drawn with magnets show simple forms, some reminiscent of music notation sheets, waveforms, or signal-noise. The work often repeats the logical, but closed system of Western music notation - a system in which “extra musicality” is denied entry - as a symbolic motif.
Some of the drawings manifest themselves in the shape of a scar, giving them a bodily reference. While a wound is a trauma or separation, the scar is what reconstitutes a whole. In Norment’s schema these scars are signifiers of dissonance - a transformation from noise, violence, and a wound into a scar. Dissonance in this way, becomes about healing, and the scar a trace of an event. In the face of current anxieties, there is also the question of the re-opening historical scars.
Another new series of glass sculptures take the form of melting bones. The skeletons belong to a small person, neither a child nor an adult, the gender is unclear. The glass objects reveal an ambiguity – fascination as well as discomfort, fragility and violence. The fact that they look as though they are melting make them alien in their continual transformation, frozen in a moment in the continuous cycle of a feedback loop.
Whether in drawing, sculpture, installation or sound, the focus in Camille Norment’s oeuvre is not necessarily the interest of pathology – even though the gendering of pathology features strongly in her work, but rather she looks at dissonance as a possible space of transformation, that can be used personally, culturally or politically.
The exhibition has been generously supported by Norsk Kulturråd and NBK.
