Elizabeth Renstrom: Basenote Bitch

February 14 to March 30, 2024

Leona Godin’s Verbal Description Tour for Blind Gallery Goers and Their Friends (Sunday March 17 at 4pm)

Elizabeth Renstrom Artist Talk (Sunday March 24 at 4pm)

Basenote Bitch is a solo exhibition of new fragrant works by Elizabeth Renstrom. Like a first love or a first shame, it’s hard to forget your first scent. Each tends to occur during those heady, hormone-filled teenage years when everything's at once fresh, exciting, awkward and unbearable.

In Basenote Bitch, Renstrom synthesizes the ecstasy and agony of naive self-image, using photography and installation to reflect on all the ways we use fragrance to project and amplify who we once may have wished to be — and perhaps still secretly do. The photographs showcase iconic retro scents —particularly ones beloved by teens across generations — satirized alongside, and contextualized within, still-life homages to the bedroom scenes where they would have been showcased or hidden away in rebellion.

A second and related component of the exhibition will be an interactive installation of objects featured in the photographs and scented with the featured perfumes. An essential extension of the work, this opportunity to spray, sniff and recall anchors attendees in sentimentality and memory in a way that only scent can.

Though the images, objects and scents are clearly fixed in the 80s, 90s and early aughts, the nature of the nostalgia they evoke varies as widely as fragrance does on individual skin. For those who lived through the years: a pang of remembrance. For those younger who may long for idealized days of landlines, dELiA*s and Jonathan Taylor Thomas: a yearning for a type of innocence they never knew and never will.