Critical and popular writing often situate my experimental, socially engaged artwork in the emerging field of olfactory art. My art and writing explore the socio-aesthetic dimensions of olfactory space with a particular emphasis on the relationship between the materiality and temporality of scent molecules. Left to their own devices, smells do not respect boundaries, which makes them a hostile sculptural medium. Due to their invisibility, they can have arresting perceptual effects that are viscerally analogous to experiencing the physical and material qualities of sculpture.
My work over the past decade begins with the question, How does your reality differ if you let your nose, rather than your eyes, lead the way? Each day we breathe approximately 23,000 times. Provided we have clear sinuses, each one of those breaths includes perceptible olfactory data; in other words, if we’re breathing, we’re smelling. Yet, how often during the day do we consider the implications of the smells that make up our environment? My recent artwork considers accidental and overlooked smells that comprise urban and rural environments (Sillage, 2011, 2014, 2016), and seeks to creatively organize them in order to tell cultural and environmental stories of migration (Scents of Exile, 2019-2022), gentrification (Smelling the City, 2011, 2013), and social identity (Olfactory Memoirs, 2015). To accomplish this, I design and compose using aromachemicals: perfume-grade olfactory materials that can be blended together to create “scent-scapes” (Balboa Stories, 2015). I have explored the narrative potential of scent-scapes by noting that the unique molecular size of an aromachemical will dictate its temporality (A Poetry Olfaction, 2015, 2016); this, in turn, allows each component of a scent composition to predictably evaporate, conveying an olfactory narrative that is literally consumed by one’s nostrils (Wenn Düfte Erzählen/When Fragrances Tell, 2019).
My research attempts to upend a longstanding sensory hierarchy, in which the “upper senses” of sight and sound are associated with values highly regarded by society, while the lower senses (smell, taste, and touch) are associated with negative values. A naive reliance on this system has had a profound, and often profoundly negative, impact on how we perceive the physical world and one another, particularly the non-Western other. My project-based art has investigated the art museum as an institution born out of an Enlightenment worldview, and thus subject to normalizing cultural and sensory biases (Institutional Wellbeing, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011). In addition to segregating the senses, the sensory hierarchy has also stigmatized cross- and multi-modal sensations, also known as synesthesia. My collaborations with chemists, food studies scholars, social scientists, authors, and musicians have created new scholarship in cross-modal research (Odophonics, 2015, 2016).
My current and future work attempts to define the contemporary through the senses of smell and taste (By Means of Smoke, 2022). The senses of smell and taste shake us awake to the differences in which other cultures experience the present. Literal and figurative migration brings together a clash of olfactory rituals, many of them culinary in nature. We live in a period of post-colonial temporality: Accelerated globalization connects desperate cultures, creating an interconnection of temporalities. Often geographic scent-scapes reveal a lot about a culture’s identity, its relationship to place, its conception of space and time.
My artistic methodology involves using open or relational systems that allow for collaborative authorship and participatory engagement (5 Cocktails, 2022). Collaborative and participatory forms activate an art audience and change its role from spectator to participant. Particularly in public art projects do I conceptualize systems that allow for a plurality of perspectives that celebrate the innumerable contributions of our diverse population. I am primarily interested in temporary forms, which I refer to as “counter-monuments,” because of the way that they provoke memory and discourse through their ephemeral nature while simultaneously pointing out that the identity of the public is always in flux. In doing site and context-responsive work I use research methods that overlay historical uses for a site with contemporary ones in order to reveal how new contexts and uses for a site address unmet needs.