Camille Altay - cv+bio

BIO

CAMILLE ALTAY (They/Them) is a trans-nonbinary visual artist, composer, builder, and cancer survivalist who’s
practice approaches personal and cultural trauma as metabolic processes of change, calling upon the tactile and
transcendental languages of materials, technologies, and bodies as co-creators of identity and culture.

Central to Camille’s work is an inquiry into categorization itself. By destabilizing the expectations and constraints of
genre, they create space for “deeply meaningful transgressions”—moments where spatial events as well as materials
and processes are reimagined and inter-act. Camille's work is at once a reflection of a changing relationship to
queerness as dancing around disidentification and a declaration of ‘survival’ of the gendered disease of breast
cancer, and speaks to the grief and trauma of a changing body in dialogue with a culture of fixed identities. Camille’s
practice questions what it means to be legible, to be held, and to belong.

In a broad view of what it means to paint, bodies and processes of art are batteries of energetic potential, desire, direction. Style and presence perform as materiality and surface. Images and languages repeat, are reinscribed, or redrawn. From the time spent building the ground of a painting to the groundedness of an arpeggiated loop, repetition becomes a conduit for collective memory, and bears witness to change.

Camille's early life as a drum and bass DJ in the vibrant rave scene of late 90s Chicago shaped their approach to
music, which remains rooted in a genre-blending style that incorporates a wide range of influences from Chicago
house, Uk hardcore, cumbia, ghetto tech, new age, techno, dub and drum and bass. Their live electronic
compositions resonate with the tensions of recorded samples as malleable material, as well as the nostalgia of an era of shifting technologies, drawing on the fragmented nature of synthesizers grappling with questions of their identity as emulating “real” instruments, or defining new voices and new identities of their own.

Whether with materials, sound, or other artists with whom they collaborate, the process is conversational. There is no outside the ecosystem, and no piece is without mutual transformation. Through this lens, music is not just frequency and vibration but a complex psychoacoustic relationship of memory, and the environment in which it lives. Camille serves as an advisor and board member of the nonprofit music organization the Bunker New York, is a founding member of the group Birds of Prey | Kathexis Records, Mysteries of the Deep and currently collaborates with Los Angeles-based musician Israel Vines under the moniker CAIV, with video collaborations including VR artist Valentina Zamfirescu. The duo’s most recent release, Dwellers EP, is available on Tresor Records, with forthcoming releases on Forest Drive West’s OODA imprint, among others.

Camille’s teaching philosophy foregrounds a studio practice that lives first in the body, encouraging instinctual leads,
and habits of writing, drawing and notation as ongoing conversations of experimentation and webs of connective
insight. Materials and processes are activated as collaborative agents of memory, encouraging students to engage
fully with the why and how in materials and methods they use. Camille’s desire is to foreground an experience-driven
pedagogy by curating and shepherding student exhibitions, collaborations, and equipping students with personal
creative tools to join in an ongoing collective conversation.

In addition to commercial fabrication, painting and on-site construction experience, Camille has been commissioned
to design and build an off-grid cabin, has supervised and fabricated work for the studios of R.H. Quaytman, Anoka
Faruqee, Ryan McGinness and others, and taught painting techniques to on-site crews in theme parks around the US and Asia. Camille was a TA for Robert Storr and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung at the Yale School of Art, worked as a
facilitator in the Painting Office at the Cooper Union, and held workshops as a teaching artist at 601 Artspace and as
a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Collaborative Arts and Media in New Haven, CT.

CAMILLE ALTAY received a BFA from Concordia University in Montreal and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking
from Yale University, where they were awarded the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize for demonstrating a “developing
consciousness, personal vision, and spirit of search.”

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MFA Yale University | Painting + Printmaking | 2018
BFA Concordia University | Montreal, QC, CA | 2008

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