Camille Casemier is a Chicago-based artist whose work explores themes of collection, archive, and cultural legacy. Central to her practice is an ongoing re-examination of her English settler family history, the narratives she was raised on, and their broader implications in contemporary life. This exploration serves as a critical lens through which she examines the intersections of value, cultural artifacts, and collecting habits by individuals and institutions. Casemier's studio practice extends into her day-job at a resale shop, where she continues to probe the cultural legacies embedded in accumulation and things. Her most recent project documents museum-goers' interactions with shrouded vitrines in the Field Museum after the 2024 NAGPRA update, gestures of insistence reminiscent of the insistent language in her settler ancestors’ accounts.
Her formative experiences with Bread and Puppet deeply influenced her sensitivity to the "liveness" of objects, further developed through her studies of dance at The New School. There, she began to consider the movement of bodies and objects between physical and virtual spaces, a concept that permeates her work today. Casemier’s projects often emerge from a single object, evolving into complex networks of gestures that unfold across pages, stages, and screens, often mediated by cameras and audiences.
She holds a joint BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now teaches in the Painting and Drawing department. Her work has been presented at Festival Arte/Acción (Mexico City), the Indonesian Performative Drawing Forum (Yogyakarta), Re-Happening at Black Mountain College, Performance Art Studies #73 (Görlitz, Germany/Zgorzelec, Poland), and the Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium of the Chicago International Puppet Festival, among other venues.
camillecasemier@gmail.com