CAMILLE ALTAY (They/Them) is a visual artist, composer and DJ who lives and works in Climax, New York.
Camille spent formative years as a drum and bass dj in the house-heavy rave scene in Chicago in the late 90s. A contrarian in nature, Camille has been known to play genre-bending sets with influences ranging from Cumbia to Ghettotech. Camille’s live electronic compositions lean toward the runaway sequences and arpeggiations of synth music in its initial stages of identity crisis - a questioning of purpose and place - whether to emulate real instruments, or subversively carve a path towards unnamed and evolving forms of identity. Camille has a recent release on the Bunker’s long-form sub label Going In, is a founding member of of the group Birds of Prey (Kathexis Records, Mysteries of the Deep), and collaborates with LA artist Israel Vines under the moniker CAIV, with the most recent release Dwellers EP out on Tresor Records.
Camille’s work is engaged in a multi-disciplinary question of material limits in space and time, driven by a need to expand the conditions of possibility of each medium. It operates at the nexus of the tactile and the transcendental, informed by the evolution of identity and culture as shared burdens. By applying pressure to the constraints of genre, these conversations find themselves at the limits of language and categorization. Through an inquiry into categorization itself, Altay reshapes feelings of instability and otherness by bending the rules of music, materials, and their methods, re-orienting them into 'deeply meaningful transgressions'.
“I'm interested in cultivating failure as a method - I tend to push things close to their point of failure, not with any ill intent, but because I can't help it and I want to know what might happen. Just to see how things resist, what stresses them out, and what they'd prefer to be doing. You think you know how a situation will break down, but more often it's a door into really surprising behavior - things behaving in a way you never thought would be logical or possible.”
Camille's works reference the elasticity of technology, and a certain playfulness that results from new technological forms running into old. A particular fascination with the identity crisis of early synthesizers – whether they were meant to be real instruments, or merely act like them – creates a fluid view of linearity, sequence, and replication. Altay’s process is guided by a conversational approach with each developing creation, and nothing is off limits. Rooms are made up not only of materials in space and time, but relationships and orientations. Music is not only frequency and vibration, but a complex psychoacoustic system shaped by others in it, by gravity, and memory. There is no outside of the system. Move one body, distort one space, use another hand, and the whole collaboration changes.
words by Benoit Pioulard, 2024.
Altay received a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal, and an MFA from Yale, as well as the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, presented to an artist “who demonstrates a developing consciousness, personal vision and spirit of search.”
CV
MFA Yale University | Painting + Printmaking 2018
BFA Concordia University | Montreal, Canada 2008
EXHIBITIONS + PERFORMANCES
2023 Live at Going In at Opus 40 | Kingston NY
Live at Mysteries of the Deep Variations | Brooklyn NY
2022 Installation for Going In at Basilica Hudson | Hudson NY
Smhoakstock XII | Live stream
Live performance for the Color Clock @ Museum of Crypto Art
2019 Yale Architecture Gallery | garden-pleasure
601 Artspace | New York
AREA gallery | Boston
2019 Faultline Journal of Arts and Letters
2018 MWTH Project | New York
Diane Rosenstein Gallery | Los Angeles
Next to Nothing Gallery | New York
Yale College | Office of the Dean
Wild Seed | Green Hall Gallery
2017 The Ottoman Empire | Sam’s Space
The Study | New Haven, Connecticut
2016 Queering Space | Green Hall Gallery
Chemistry Creative | The End | Brooklyn, New York
The Tappan Collective | Los Angeles, California
UNICEF Juried Exhibition | Los Angeles
2015 Mysteries of The Deep | Brooklyn, New York
2014 Leows Regency Hotel | New York, New York
Mariner Silver EP | Navy Yard Records | NY001
Bossa Nova Social Club | Brooklyn, New York
Twenty Grand Studios | Brooklyn, New York
2013 The Williamsburg Art and Historical Center | Brooklyn, New York
National Underground | New York
2012 The Blind Barber | Imagining Sisyphus Happy | New York
The Phatory Gallery | Beautiful Fields presents Phenomena | New York
GO Brooklyn | Brooklyn, New York
2010 Light/Weight | Ringwood, New Jersey
The Greenpoint Gallery | Brooklyn, New York
Richardson Studios | Brooklyn, New York
2009 The Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts | Wilmington, Delaware
Little Skips | Brooklyn, New York
Windows Gallery | Queens, New York
2008 Veaux Gallery | New York
Milio's | Chicago, Illinois
Logan Square Artspace | Chicago, Illinois
2007 Millennium Park | Great Performers of Illinois Festival | Chicago, Illinois
La Société des Arts Technologiques | Pure Data Summit | Montreal, Quebec
Galerie FOFA Concordia University | Montreal, Quebec
2006 Foufouns Electriques | Montreal, Quebec
Concordia University | Art Matters Festival | Montreal, Quebec
Salon Rouge | Montreal, Quebec
2005 Foufounes Electriques | Montreal, Quebec POP Montreal | Montreal, Quebec
Concordia University | Art Matters | Montreal, Quebec
2003 Trap Door Theater | Fringe Festival | Chicago, Illinois
The Chopin Theater | Chicago, Illinois
2002 National Juried Exhibition of Student Works | Museum of Contemporary Art | Chicago
FELLOWSHIPS AND AWARDS
2018 Yale University | Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize
2018 Basic Drawing | Yale School of Art Teaching Assistant | Professor Robert Storr
2017 Basic Painting | Yale School of Art Teaching Assistant | Professor Molly Zuckerman-Hartung
2017 Yale School of Art | Travel Grant Institute for Investigative Living | Joshua Tree, CA
2016 Yale Center for Collaborative Arts and Media | Grad Fellow
2006 Concordia University | Fine Art Student Alliance Grant | Montreal, Quebec
2005 Art Matters Festival | Production Grant | Montreal, Quebec
2003 Gallery 37 | Artist Fellowship | Chicago, Illinois
2002 Free Street Theater | Artist Fellowship | Chicago, Illinois
ECP Merit Award | School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Gallery 37 Artist Fellowship | Chicago, Illinois
MUSIC RELEASES and PUBLICATIONS
2024
CAIV Dwellers EP | Tresor Records
Melanie Klein Bottle | Going In
Deleuzians + Diagonals I+II | Self Released
Vanishing Point | MOTDLP004
Oath | Mysteries of The Deep
Entropy EP | BOP003
Orphan Anvil EP | BOP002
Birds of Prey | Kathexis Records | KTX002
Birds of Prey Nocturne EP | BOP001
James Catchpole, A Closer Listen, review of Birds of Prey, September 7, 2015
Brian Kolada, Resident Advisor News, July 20, 2015
Brooks Barnes, "Clash of the Theme Parks," The New York Times, Monday, May 21, 2012, B1.
Nightlife Magazine Montreal, June 2006.
No Commercial Value Montreal, April 2006.