Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-SmithUntitled
Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-Smith
Public presentation on Thursday, October 27, 2022, 5:30 pm.
During this residency, Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-Smith will work on the development of a multimedia immersive installation of original and archival portraits of a house, a family, and a self, currently Untitled. The project is an at times playful, at times melancholic exploration of materiality and recollection in a cultural moment of planned obsolescence and digitally-mediated experience and memory.
Untitled is constituted by a constellation of moving and still images, stories, fragments, objects, and performance, woven together. The line between documentary and fiction is blurred: an indistinguishable blend of oral history, imperfect memory, linear and nonlinear timelines, all offering a commentary about memory and recollection, materiality, slowness, and living with technology.
All components of the project were shot on location at Eidsvoll, a centerpiece of this project and a former family home in Oxfordshire, United Kingdom, for multiple generations of the artist’s family. The house is itself a personnage, a fixture in family lore and psychologies. Eidsvoll had stood for 100 years almost exactly as it was built — by the artist’s Norwegian great grandfather — but, was recently scheduled for demolition by new ownership. The project is simultaneously an act of preservation and a performative, poetic meditation on time that challenges the linear narrative of experience.
Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-Smith
Ingrid Olivia Norrmén-Smith is a researcher, writer, and emerging filmmaker whose work engages with health, wellbeing, technology, and the psyche. Over the last decade, she has navigated multiple spheres and different lenses: the neurobiological, the phenomenological, the artistic. She is drawn to stories that explore recollection, human-technological relations, existential questions of expectation and that highlight the miraculous and banal idiosyncracies of human life. She is exploring these themes by way of intimate portraiture, nonlinear narrative, states of enchantment, and meditations on memory and time. Her multimedia work has been shown in Montréal, Los Angeles, Como, Italy and New York with upcoming work to be shown in London, England. She holds a B.S. in Neuroscience and an M.Sc. in Psychiatry. She is a Watson Fellow, a Pulitzer Center Fellow, and an alumnus of the Salt Institute. She was born in New York City, currently operating between Montréal and London. At present, Norrmén-Smith works in independent film production for award-winning, Montréal-based boutique production company, Catbird Productions.
