Co-curated with Alessia Oliva, for Centre for Art Tapes’ 2019 Curatorial Residency.
You can find the complete work here.
Arielle Twist
Camila Salcedo
Camille Rojas
Madeleine Scott
Poems for Impending Doom brings together four artists who have never previously collaborated and asks them to create art in pairs, while exploring and documenting collaborative and communicative processes.
Website designed by Rahul Shinde
Co-curated with Luke Mohan, at the Anna Leonowens Gallery in Halifax, NS.
Featuring
Abby Bent
Anouk Hoogendoorn
Brandon Hollohan
Camila Salcedo
Chloe Elgie
Erika Verhagen
Rachel Anzalone
Sophia Bartholomew
Sophie Wonfor
Smoked glycerin; sweetgrass pressed between plexiglass; oil of wintergreen; the distress signal of freshly cut grass; earth; sweat; reading in the bath; the wax of a familial altar; the citrus of oranges.
The term olfactory refers to the sensory system of smell. It shares a connection in the human body with taste forming the chemosensory system (as both process the chemical composition of our world). What makes smell so monumental to us (as humans) is in the way our bodies absorb scent. When we smell, the molecules pass directly from our olfactory bulb into our limbic system, bonding to our memories and emotions. In Adam Jasper and Nadia Wagner’s essay Notes on Scent they describe this direct process: “In a peculiar way, smelling short-circuits conscious thoughts. It bonds to memory and emotion before it subjects itself to concepts, and emerges as already a part of the bodily unconscious.”1 This association with emotions and memory is where most of the nine artists derive their response to the theme of care. The artists make smell and care inextricable through healing, harming, remembering, tenderness, and communication. They pursue memory and twist nostalgia through frameworks of class, family healing, dating and desire.
We have no vocabulary in the English language unique to describing scent. It is finicky to make last and unphotographable. Since smell isn’t visually indicated, how best do we represent it in catalogues/books/Instagram posts? We can try to describe it in words and explain how it makes us feel, but that isn’t the art experience itself. Olfactory art thusly demands presence. And since it demands people to be there and experience it, our roles as curators, ask us to do our best to make the gallery as accessible to the public as possible.
Lucy Pauker and Luke Mohan, K’jipuktuk (Halifax), July 2018
Wagner, Nadia, and Adam Jasper. "Notes on Scent." Cabinet. Accessed July 2018. http://cabinetmagazine.org/issues/32/jasper_wagner.php.
Photography by Seamus Gallagher
Co-curated with Camila Salcedo.
The 2018 NSCAD Grad Exhibition is an annual display of work from the graduating class. Featuring 50+ artists in three galleries at the Anna Leonowens Gallery.
Photography by Seamus Gallagher
Co-curated with Camila Salcedo.
Featuring work by:
Scott Kedy
Heather Euloth and Brent Cleveland
Annie Onyi Cheung
Sophie Wonfor
Kyle Alden Martens
Maya Ben David
Selina Latour
Luke Mohan
Hannah Zbitnew
Hannah McGrath
Luis Figueroa
2016, Anna Leonowens Gallery, Halifax, NS.
Photography by Selina Latour
