"Both make use of feedback and resonance effects, and treat music as both sonic and physical phenomena. Both are rigorous yet accessible, and both may leave you hungry to see the artist in concert."
New York Times 17 March 2022.

Visit also the Dia Art Foundatioin project for information on the "Constellations" public engagement series, performance, book launch, and more: https://www.diaart.org/exhibition/exhibitions-projects/camille-norment-plexus-exhibition/

In the center of the Dia 541 W. 22nd St. gallery sits a large brass sculpture that simultaneously recalls a bell, singing bowl, and horn. Another brass form resembling a clapper (the tongue of a bell) or a mute (a device used to change the timbre of an instrument) extends from a stem that drops from the ceiling above. As a unified sculpture, the work summons and amplifies ambient sound directed into it through a feedback loop facilitated by four live microphones projecting from the ceiling. As one nears the glowing sculpture, faint spectral artifacts of static from 1960s and ’70s radio broadcasts (including community reporting and documentation of social and environmental struggles) become audible through the feedback.

The installation in the 545 gallery takes the history of its site as a point of departure. First a shoreline, next a landfill, and then a port, Chelsea has undergone significant change, including in the last century as it was transformed through gentrification from an industrial area to a dense cultural district. Building on these geologic, maritime, and manufacturing histories, Norment considers our complex relationships to land, water, and labor. In this work she references human migration across oceans and the disruption of ecological systems such as the recent floods in this neighborhood as a challenge to the urban environment. 

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  For Norment, the bell, sine wave, and feedback—tones used throughout the space—resonate with ideas of experienced time, historicity, power, resistance, and agency. While the striking of a bell often marks measured time or a significant event, its subsequent droning effect lends voice to those experiences in between. “The bell drone is at once a memory, a medium, and a summoning—its voice [echoes] through space and time in prediction of its own return,” Norment has stated. The artist envisioned the installation as an instrument to be activated through the public’s spontaneous engagement with the work. Visitors moving throughout the gallery act as both composers and receivers, impacting the soundscape and thus the work itself. As the artist notes, the feedback elicited by the movement of bodies “is a state of alarm; it is systemic pattern; it is a communal gathering; it is an exponential saturation of voice, existing and experienced as a negotiation of control.

  The visitor is immersed within an entrancing yet dissonant soundscape of dynamic feedback loops and entangled histories, the subjectivity of individual bodies, physical and metaphysical spaces. The work resides within the aural and tactile impact of being—both as a singular body and in relation to others.

  In the second part of the exhibition within the 545 gallery, monumental sculptural forms, made of responsibly sourced wood, extend from the architecture like structural growths onto the floor as a continuation of the vaulted ceiling, which itself resembles the ribbed frame of a ship. Both rhizomatic and systematic, the wooden sculptures isolate and unify the voices of twelve singers, as well as the sound of grinding teeth, vibrating through their structural limbs. The visitor experience changes as one encounters the work; a microtonal chorus is audible when one is moving through the room and then, when one sits or lies on the wood sculptures, the vibrations of these voices are felt through the body. In contrast to the higher frequencies present in the adjacent room, the low humming here uses the drone of voices to evoke states of being ranging from utterances of pleasure to somber moaning. Here the social is interconnected with ecological material, exposing our inextricable relationship to our environment while highlighting the potential for growth and rebuilding. 

  By engaging the architectural and sonic aspects of Dia Chelsea, these commissions extend Norment’s focus on evolutionary feedback, that is, the historical and contemporary relations between one another as well as people and the environment. As visitors move through both spaces, they encounter entrancing yet dissonant soundscapes and feedback loops of entangled histories, as well as experiencing the aural and tactile impact of being—both as a singular body and in relation to others.

  
  
  

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