CMA Concerts at Transformer Station

Multimedia artist Camille Norment's current trajectory of work includes live performance as a mode of exploring the formal and cultural consonances and dissonances in music, freely collapsing any given genre and aesthetic spectrums. A resident of Norway, Norment will perform a mix of glass armonica and electronics for the first time in Cleveland with her trio. In a unique ensemble, the Camille Norment Trio unites the sounds of the electric guitar, the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, electronics and the rare glass armonica to explore the instruments’ collective sensual and contextual psychoacoustics. Each of the instruments were simultaneously revered and feared, or even outlawed, at various points in their histories. Toll, their latest album, resonates through a tantalizing union of its instruments’ voices and their paradoxical cultural histories. 

Tickets are $20 ($18 for CMA members) and available online, at the Cleveland Museum of Art box office, and Transformer Station. Please be advised seating is very limited. 

About this City Stages Concert Series: 
Setting a standard for vanguard art, the Transformer Station also heralds a new space for adventurous music. This fall marks the start of a series of intimate and (mostly) solo concerts presented by the Cleveland Museum of Art, featuring composed and improvised music by some of the most remarkable artists of our time. Virtuosic on every level.

Related:

> Contemporary/Contradictory: Q+A with Glass Armonica and Electronics Artist Camille Norment
> Share this event on Facebook

About Camille Norment:

Camille Norment's multi-media art engages the viewer as a physical and psychological participant through architectural, optical illusory, sonic, interactive environments and objects, and drawings that are 'enlivened' by the presence of the viewer. With emphasis on manipulating both the visual and sonic perceptual realms, Norment 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. 

Norment's current trajectory of work includes live performance as a mode of exploring the formal and cultural consonances and dissonances in music, freely collapsing given genre and aesthetic spectrums. Other works repeatedly use motifs such as shadows, ghostly aspects, or reflections as a representation of the “in-between” or states of suspended transition. Ambivalent cultural memories are condensed into physical, spatial, and temporal experiences that have the hallucinatory qualities of psychological atmospheres.

Amongst several permanent public artworks, Norment was commissioned a permanent sound installation for the Henie Onstad Art Center (2011). The extensive international fine arts exhibition credits also include: exhibition and performance in the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2013); a commissioned artwork and performance for the Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo (2012); Liste Young Art Fair (2009); the Thessaloniki Biennial, Greece (2007); Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland; 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.

Her work has been featured in Art Forum, Art in America, The New York Times, Kunst Kritikk, Aftenposten, The Wire magazine, and numerous other international texts. 

Performing with her trio in Cleveland, described as a slipstream of warping time and abrasive textures, the music levels beauty with noise, and the consonant with the dissonant as it embraces scratches, feedback, and taunting microtones as equals to purest of tones. Forming earworms and wooing songs, simple melodic phrases reference one another; the echo is like the conjuring and re-forming of a memory that is at once psychological and somatic. At times it is hypnotic while, at others, it forms a wall of intense, complex sound. Two-time Bessie award winning actor and dancer Okwui Okpokwasili collaborates on one of the works with original spoken word. German music review periodical Nordische Musik praises Toll as “An outstanding CD especially for fans of artists such as Marhaug, Sunn 0))), Ratkje and Vainio and all who have been looking for the missing link between Pärt and the noise scene.

Camille Norment's appearance is supported by:

This concert series is presented at:

The Transformer Station is a new contemporary art museum on Cleveland’s west side, owned by the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Foundation. For six months a year, the Cleveland Museum of Art will present exhibitions with internationally recognized artists, using it as a creative laboratory.

For hours and other information, visit transformerstation.org.