Artist-in-Residence at Sculpture Space, New York / April 4, 2018

I’m really looking forward to doing a residency at Sculpture Space in New York. And I’m thrilled to have been selected by juror, John Monti, Graduate Professor of Fine Arts at Pratt Institute. The forms and color of his work often evokes in me a sort of scent synesthesia. (Future collaboration? I wish…)

So my residency will be primarily concerned with exploring the sculptural dimensions of olfactory space. We smell because scent molecules, known as odorants, evaporate, which give the impression of a smell when inhaled. Left to their own devices, smells do not respect boundaries, which makes them a hostile sculptural medium. Yet due to their invisibility, they can have arresting perceptual effects that, in my opinion, compare in terms of viscerality to experiencing the physical and material qualities of sculpture. 

Then there is the temporality of smell. Depending on the size of the molecule, evaporation takes place quickly or slowly, which is to say the intensity of some smells diminish within seconds or minutes, while other last hours, even days. So composing smell for an art experience is necessarily a time-based proposition. 

During my residency I'll be fabricating systems that contain and distribute smells in order to better control the spatial and temporal dimensions of the medium. More info as it develops!