Scents and smells are these artists’ paintbrush
Trailblazers use aromas, both good and bad, to explore and disrupt how we view art
The smell of pavement when it starts to rain, the pages in an old book, your mother’s perfume — these odours may evoke memories, images flashing in our minds. But then, how to describe them?
“There’s no language for it,” said Jim Drobnick, a critic, curator and associate professor at OCAD University.
“It has a real presence and ephemerality to it.”
Art, for a long time, has focused on the visual, the easiest medium to reproduce and to describe. But technology is starting to solve that problem, Drobnick said.
There are new ways to detect what makes up a smell and to reproduce it, including devices such as electronic noses that list the chemicals in, say, a flower. Creating scent is a science that’s also art.
And a handful of trail-blazing artists are exploiting scent to disrupt the ways we’re used to consuming art. They’re creating pleasant scents and putrid odours.
Artists explore the politics of space with, at times, intimidating scents. “People have to breathe . . . whereas you can choose not to look at a painting,” he says. Here are a handful of artistic works that use scent as their medium.
Jessica Vallentin
Toronto artist Jessica Vallentin’s work focuses on scent, at times pairing it with sculpture, images and sound. Her installations have ranged from barely there scents — disseminated by hidden diffusers Drobnick says make you question your perception — to recreating the scents of her peers.
Vallentin says she was always drawn to scents, but a university course on consumer marketing with smell made her aware of its use and effect on people. In using scent, Vallentin says her goals vary, but that if it makes people simply think about scent, if they “become aware of what’s already there,” she’s happy. Last fall, her scent portraits called In Search of Madeleine were shown at the Younger Than Beyonce Gallery on Dundas St. E.
Ephemera
That’s Why We End Perfumist Geza Schoen created three scents inspired by “raw sonic material” created by artists Ben Frost, Tim Hecker and Steve Goodman at last year’s Unsound at the Hearn Generating Station.
The scents were called Noise, Drone and Bass. They smelled like incense, forest, saffron, black pepper, juniper, patchouli. “I want to set up the conditions for possible confusion, possible confounding, possible enlightenment, possibly annoyance,” Hecker told the Star at the time.
Odor Limits
Jim Drobnick became interested in scent when he read Alain Corbin 20 years ago and made it part of his PhD’s focus. He has curated art shows involving olfaction, including Odor Limits (2008) in Philadelphia and reminiSCENT (2003) in Toronto. Odor Limits featured Oswaldo Macia, Jenny Marketou, Chrysanne Stathacos and Clara Ursitti. It included a smell map and garbage cans filled with scents audiences were to associate with the fictional inhabitants of an apartment.
Chrysanne Stathacos
Toronto artist Chrysanne Stathacos created The Wish Machine after visiting a wishing tree in New Delhi, India in 1995, during the AIDS crisis.
The result is a vending machine that dispenses essential oils associated with desires — a “multisensory experience,” Stathacos’s website states. For example, rose is love and lavender is happiness, according to her website. It was installed at one point in New York City’s Grand Central Station and in Philadelphia’s Esther M. Klein Gallery in the Odor Limits exhibition.
“Since the act of wishing often pinpoints one’s desire for change; The Wish Machine has transformed busy public areas into spaces of reflection,” Stathacos’s website says.
Aleesa Cohene
Aleesa Cohene’s work combines scent, video, sound, sculpture and dance, creating immersive installations that can’t be easily reproduced.
By using those media, Cohene bypasses “capitalist ends.” Instead, she is “interested in making work that makes the viewer internal to the process . . . scent brings the unconscious out,” she said in an email to the Star.
Cohene, who is born in Vancouver and divides her time between Toronto and Los Angeles, incorporates scent by diffusing it in the room, or infusing it in sculptures.
In her 2012 piece That’s Why We End, a stack of scented dress shirts and bow ties hung on the wall, amid smells of ambrette seed, cucumber, grass, neroli, orange flower blossom and tomato stems. The scents are meant to be evocative: with them, “we feel transported or rooted; we are inside a feeling,” Cohene said.
Clara Ursitti
Clara Ursitti’s work with smell is a type of social commentary — at times serious and others humorous — that began in the 1990s, when she decided to create a fragrance of her body odour. “Because scent is so subjective, I can’t really expect one reaction,” said Ursitti from Glasgow, Scotland, where she lives and works.
She cites Bill, an installation that simply involved diffusing the scent of semen into a room.
“Some people don’t recognize it, other people are really offended by it and some people find it really funny,” said Ursitti, who’s from North Bay and studied in Toronto before moving to Scotland 23 years ago.
Monument, a 2015 work of hers commissioned for The Smell of War exhibition in Belgium, diffused the scent of decaying flesh into a room every hour, “similar to the daily ringing of church bells,” according to her website. In more recent works, Ursitti has paired the scent of strong men’s cologne with hot rods, which disperse the smell along a city street.
“The disappointing thing for me would be if that reaction (to the work) was that it was viewed as an air freshener, do you see what I mean, where it’s ambient smells,” Ursitti said. “So my challenge is to not make something ambient.”