Matt Scott and Zack Adams; Untitled (Room 1), 2023; Scents Suspended in Wax
Statement by Gayil Nalls, Curator
It is exciting to present artwork that explores and expresses powerful visual and olfactory ideas that assist in a deeper understanding of the critical role that the sense of smell and interpretation of odors plays in our lives.
Contemporary art that gives power to the sense of smell is an area that I helped pioneer and many have followed. Although Olfactory Art is nothing new historically, the work being made now reveals understandings and connections to the science of olfaction that underpin olfactory art’s recognition, value, and aesthetics.
Where I was influenced by only a few artists such as Joseph Beuys, Wolfgang Laib and Mario Merz, who used materials that naturally smelled, today, creating olfactory sensation is a freedom enfolded into the work of many young artists who use a broad range of materials and substances. Their making of olfactory meaning takes an aesthetic experience to a greater reality, with smells that can be pleasant or loathsome, disturbing, or intimately revealing, drawing viewers deeper into conscious (and nonconscious) sensory-evoked realities.
The exhibition BLENDS: Explorations of Memory, Identity, Intimacy, Ecology, and Danger, brings together eight artists who I first got to know though their involvement with World Sensorium. They are all people that think critically and creatively about olfaction and use olfactory sensation to direct emotional outcomes important to their work. The contemplations of these artists bring us closer to the emotional significance the scientific findings redefining the importance of olfaction in recent years, along with the fact that we all live scented lives and carry-on scented communication.
Through different artistic approaches and representational hierarchy combined with scent, the physical qualities of photographs, drawings, sculptures, and performance, trace the telltale signs of disease, the self-sacrificing nature kin selection, the importance of odor as an invisible navigation system. The works also explore how the sensation of odorant molecules are part of the cognitive framework of memory, relationships, perception of different places, and unique experience of olfactory alchemy. Through olfaction, different properties and sensory modalities of artistic immersion and embodiment come into play.
The sense of smell is always active and has key evolutionary roles that are collectively in play today and olfactory art reminds us of our place within this system and the web of all life. Along with visual sensation, the chemical substances in these works communicate about diverse themes. Some of these artworks are informative social fluids that bring on olfactory sensations and emotions that put us in touch with our evolutionary roots, reminding us that some natural aromatics can trigger preconditioned behavior.
My heartfelt thanks to these remarkable artists for their collaboration in making this exhibition and to Andreas Keller, for his commitment to showcasing and creating community around the olfactory arts.
BLENDS: Explorations of Memory, Identity, Intimacy, Ecology, and Danger
Thursday, March 23- Saturday, April 29, 2023
Artist Symposium: Sunday, April 23, 2-4pm
Olfactory Art Keller is pleased to present BLENDS: Explorations of Memory, Identity, Intimacy, Ecology, and Danger, an exhibition curated by Gayil Nalls, featuring the work of eight artists that think critically and creatively about olfaction and use olfactory sensation to direct emotional outcomes important to their visual work.
For American interdisciplinary artist Gayil Nalls, a pioneer of olfactory art, it’s a fact that artists and scientists share common ground responding to their observations. However, she has found that the contemplations of artists bring us closer to the emotional significance of our scientific findings. The role of olfaction is far-reaching and vital for survival and the works in the exhibition cover a range aesthetic experience. Jake Eshelman explores biochemical communication and the aromatic phenomena of orchid bee perfume. Fiona Kane documents memories and her olfactory responsiveness to body odors of relatedness enmeshed in fashion clothing of her mother and grandmother. Lyndsey Walsh explores the volatile organic compounds created by the body that are biomarkers of disease. Margaux Crump co-creates with the power and influence of substances. Matt Scott and Zack Adams give us a construct of the odors of shared living spaces reminding us that we navigate by smell. Alina Fresquez Patrick explores memory and familial attachment to place through scent and photographic collages. Paul Head has built a smell based on the interactive cycles and olfactory nature of everyday living.
Margaux Crump’s Spells for Protection IV, from her Spells for Protection series, is a dimensional drawings on silk made with plants and minerals historically used for protection magic. The companion apotropaic scent Smells for Protection is composed of plant oils and absolutes associated with cleansing, protection, purification, and energy magic.
Jake Eshelman explores biochemical communication and the aromatic phenomena of orchid bee perfume. He has made a solid perfume blend like the one he used on his hand and arm to introduce himself to the orchid bees in the rainforest of Costa Rica.
The scent Joker is a blending Paul Head has been working on since he moved into his first apartment with no roommates, permitting him a new level of introspection. The inspiration for the scent derived from the Tarot card known as the Joker that symbolizes life and death, but importantly, also new beginnings. The artist’s performance Smelling without Expectation will be woven throughout the Artist Symposium on Sunday April 23.
Fiona Kane’s Old Dress Smell and Six Self Portraits in Dresses pairs the artist’s photographs of herself dressed in family heirloom dresses passed down to her from her mother and grandmother, taken in multiple locations in her hometown in coastal Southern California with a scent that brings a physical olfactory dimension to the collection that links to their relationship in terms of the preferred odor of familiarity and kin recognition.
Ina series of scents and photographic collages, Alina Fresquez Patrick explores memory and familial attachment to place. As part of the moments of encounters with each location, she has created a scent, a description or impression, of a place she occupied and held internally.
Scent stimuli from everyday objects in our surroundings help build our cognitive maps. In Untitled (Room 1), Matt Scott and Zack Adams sought to explore humanity’s significant ability of olfactory wayfinding with aesthetics that argues for recognition of these ongoing performances. Each wax object, cast from discarded toys and personal artifacts has its own olfactory identification making each an olfactory landmark.
EAU DE PARFUM TMAU by Berlin-based artist Lyndsey Walsh is a smell composition based on the smell of the medical condition Trimethylaminuria, otherwise known as Fish Odor Syndrome. With EAU DE PARFUM TMAU, Walsh attempts to recreate the smell of the genetic condition while critically reflecting on the ways we culturally and socially value particular genetic conditions and bodily traits.