Art exhibit gives an experience of history through smell
September 5, 2008
Reg Vardy Gallery in Sunderland, England recently hosted a fascinating scent art exhibit called “If There Ever Was: an exhibition of extinct and impossible smells.” The exhibit, put together by conceptual artist Robert Blackson, considered scent as “integral to the perception of abstraction and representation.” The scents created for the exhibit were inspired by their absence: we would never, ever otherwise be smelling them because they don’t exist. For example, the scents of four extinct flowering plants were created based on mixing aromas of their existing relatives with historical reports of how the extinct flowers smelled. Other scents in the exhibit included the surface of the Sun (created by heating various metals known to be part of the sun), communism, Hiroshima, “surrender” (did you know incense was once burned in the middle east to indicate surrender to an advancing army?), the Titanic, the Russian space station Mir, the last meal of a man who was executed in 1990, and more.
Fortunately for those of us who couldn’t be there, all of the “extinct and impossible” scents from the exhibit have been reproduced in a book, pictured above.
Participating artists included Kóan Jeff Baysa, Mark Buxton, Bertrand Duchaufour, Christoph Hornetz, Christophe Laudamiel, Patricia Millns, Steven Pearce, David Pybus – Scents of Time, Geza Schön, Sissel Tolaas, and Maki Ueda.
Read more at the Reg Vardy Gallery’s web site
Buy the book from Word Power Books
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed