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It’s not the cozy scent of a soul-warming hearth, Mr. Kurkdjian said, but a cold, marble fireplace after the flame has been extinguished. The soot and ash left behind is meant to help the audience “feel the sourness” of a conversation between a son and his father, whose sins this son disclosed to the entire family.
— Perfumer Francis Kurkdjian scents a movie. Read more at What’s That Smell? It’s ‘Festen,’ a Play and Film With Aroma at the New York Times.
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The vision of Cartier’s in-house fragrance nose Mathilde Laurent, Le Nuage Parfumé - aka the Unidentified Scented Object - is located at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The scented object is in fact a cloud, a puff of perfume if you will. Inside a glass cube sits a suspended spiral staircase with a floating cloud that hovers elegantly just below the ceiling. It looks abstract on first impression, almost an illusion until closer inspection when the texture of the cloud is clear to see.
— Read more about Cartier's new art installation in Paris at What Is Cartier's Le Nuage Perfume Experience All About? at Vogue UK. The scent in the "cloud", by the way, is L'Envol de Cartier, and Le Nuage Parfumé is open to visitors from today through Monday.
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When visitors enter the exhibition, canisters spritz scents derived from body odor originating from Asian American women and carpenter ants in a work titled “Immigrant Caucus.” To create the fragrance, Yi sampled the women’s sweat and worked with forensic chemist Kenneth Furton to identify the chemical constituents of the human body odors. [...]
With a list of the women’s sweaty top notes in hand, Yi then worked with a Parisian perfumer to recreate a synthetic interpretation of the armpit aroma and spiked the concoction with smelly chemicals emitted by carpenter ants.
— Anicka Yi’s exhibition “Life Is Cheap” is open at the Guggenheim through July 5. Read more at Olfactory science meets contemporary art, plus ants at Chemical & Engineering News, or see Please Smell the Art: Anicka Yi Will See That You Do at The New York Times, or Artist Anicka Yi’s Scents and Sensibilities at Vogue.
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To create this fatalistic fragrance, the pair went through the Book of Revelation, plucking out every mention of a scented element: thunder, blood, rocks of the mountains, incense, wormwood, rod of iron, creatures of the sea, hail and fire, animal horns, flesh burned with fire, brimstone and, of course, a grievous sore. They then passed this somewhat unlikely shopping list on to Edinburgh-based perfumer Euan McCall to turn the 1611 King James Bible’s vision of annihilation into a “wearable scent”. That’s right, a limited-edition bottle of liquid doom can be yours for just £300 plus VAT.
— You can smell Apocalypse, a fragrance by artists Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, at the exhibit Party Booby Trap at Carroll/Fletcher in London through 25 May. Read more at I sniffed the end of the world, and it smells like bile and dread at The Guardian.
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For her latest project, commissioned by the Smithsonian's Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum for the fifth installment of its Design Triennial, she tackled the scent of Central Park. Tolaas has done location-focused works in the past, capturing the scents of places such as Istanbul and Greenland, and with Manhattan’s most famous park in the Cooper Hewitt’s backyard, it made sense to develop a work based on that area.
But as the theme of this year’s Triennial is “Beauty,” Tolaas sought to play against what she calls “the classic clichés” of the word. When someone tries to imagine a “beautiful smell,” he or she might imagine perfume, fragrant food or some other pleasing scent. But for this show, Tolaas says, “I wanted to show the other side, and look at the beauty of decay.”
— Scent artist Sissel Tolaas has a touch-and-smell wall at the Cooper Hewitt's Design Triennial, open now through August 21. Read more at Can Smell Be a Work of Art? at Smithsonian Magazine.