Commodity Exchange
Hannah Marie Marcus
March 22 to April 19 2025 @ Olfactory Art Keller
25A Henry Street, New York 10002, NY
Opening Reception on Saturday March 22 from 5pm to 8pm
Olfactory Art Keller is honored to present Hannah Marie Marcus’ first solo exhibition, Commodity Exchange, a confabulatory conceptual scented estate sale and ritual reckoning of value. For Commodity Exchange, Marcus, who in her works often creates narratives starting from a specific scent, takes a perfume she was creating for her mother as a ghostly compass. The fragrance her mother requested was a pillow-scent: a reimagining of Guerlain’s Eau De Fleurs De Cedrat, Research into the perfume (and a few failed attempts at it) led Marcus down a winding path of narrative confabulations during which she discovered that Cedrat was the French name for Citrus Medica, also known as Citron or Etrog, depending on the context.
Marcus made a few odd versions of the scent and then moved on to other projects, but the venture took on another significance when her mother, the photorealism pioneer Audrey Flack, passed away in June 2024. After her mother’s death Marcus engaged again with the smell of Citron, and specifically the scent of Etrog (acquired from a farm in California). Marcus’ mother was an avid collector of items of indeterminate value. In Commodity Exchange, the Etrog scent is used as a guide through objects Marcus saved while cleaning out her parents’ home.
In contrast to the sorting of archives and art objects designed for posterity, Marcus found that cleaning out her mother’s medicine cabinet was an unexpectedly intimate and strange experience. An altar-like version of the medicine cabinet sits in the back of the gallery behind several candles, inviting visitors to engage in their version of ritual contemplation. The small personal objects, which were highly valued by Marcus’ mother but now are in a limbo of undetermined subjective value, are for sale. Interested new owners can pay what they wish through an alms box which will support the gallery, thereby determining the new value of the objects. Buyers are then invited to memorialize their purchased object by describing it on joss paper, anointing the paper with the scent of Citrus Medica, and pinning it to the wall of the gallery.
Several assemblages of larger, more valuable objects - an Egyptian Schawabi, a Victorian inkwell, or the skull of a bull - are also placed in arrangements that lend them a new narrative significance. Instead of buying these assemblages, interested parties will agree in writing to keep the assembled arrangements intact for a period of time, during which they will engage in a periodic long-distance collaborative exchange with Marcus. Criteria for custody will depend on the nature and potential desirability of the objects, but will include periodically answering certain prompts regarding the assemblages via email. After the agreed period (likely one year) the clustered objects will be released from their constraints and their custodians will be free to do with the objects as they wish.
The scent of Citrus Medica infuses the exhibition as a unifying theme. Citrus Medica, or Citron - considered one of the 3 original citrus species along with mandarin and pomelo - has a rich and diverse cultural history. It was an aromatic component of Egyptian burial rituals. As Etrog it appears on ancient coins from Judea and is part of the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. As Uttruj it is mentioned in the Hadith, the Islamic sayings of Mohammed. As Cedrat it is the inspiration for the perfumer Jacques Guerlain’s 1920 cologne Eau de Fleurs de Cedrat.
As conscious beings we hallucinate value: from perceptual to symbolic, from moral to ritual. The smeller is invited to engage with Commodity Exchange under the influence of diverse narrative assumptions, confabulations, judgements and hallucinations, and to create their own.
We can remember that discrimination, conviction and elevation are also exclusion, indictment and rejection. The space between value judgments might be uncomfortable, but through collaborative engagement with objects of shifting value - sensory, sentimental, monetary, even ethical - the artist hopes to open up possibilities for engagement with the intimacy and vulnerability of the precious limbo state that can arise in the shadow of death.
(Hannah’s stepfather was a commodities broker for many years. He died in May 2024, less than six weeks before her mother.)