Elizabeth Renstrom. Basenote Bitch.

Still lifes of adolescence

Elizabeth Renstrom is a photographer who works in still life. In Basenote Bitch, shown at Olfactory Art Keller in New York from February 14 to March 30, 2024, her subject was the classic perfumes that generations of teenagers have loved.

She does not photograph them like advertising. No seamless backdrop, no flawless light, no model's hand. Each bottle is set into a reconstructed corner of a bedroom: a desk, a bedside shelf, the clutter of a child who is growing up. One of the exhibition's images shows Dior's Fahrenheit among such objects.

The bedroom is the right place. It is where a first perfume lives. The bottle is displayed to be seen, or hidden away, because sometimes simply owning perfume was a small act of rebellion. Renstrom keeps both possibilities inside the frame.

Satire and recognition

Renstrom's still lifes are satirical. They exaggerate a little, arrange a little too carefully, like a room trying to look older than its occupant. Viewers recognise that room at once, because most of us once had one like it.

The exhibition addresses what the gallery text calls the ecstasy and agony of a naive self image. Adolescence is when we try on many versions of ourselves. Clothes, haircuts, music, and scent. Of these, scent is the most invisible yet is believed to be the most powerful. One spray in the morning and we walk out the door as someone new, at least in our own heads.

The title borrows a perfumer's word for the part of a scent that lingers longest on skin, then pairs it with crude slang. That collision sets the tone for the whole show: half affectionate, half mocking, and open about the fact that the artist once stood in that same room.

Spray, sniff, recall

The second part of Basenote Bitch is an installation. Objects that appear in the photographs are taken out of the frame, placed in the gallery and scented with the very perfumes the images refer to. Visitors are invited to spray, sniff and recall.

Here the work changes character. Before the photograph, the visitor is an observer, with enough distance to laugh. Before the scent, the distance collapses. A perfume that once filled a school corridor does not wait for permission. It opens an old room, an old friend, an old version of oneself.

Olfactory Art Keller also held two events alongside the show. On March 17, the writer Leona Godin led a verbal description tour for blind visitors and their companions. On March 24, Renstrom gave an artist talk. The description tour carries a particular weight here: in an exhibition that sets images beside smells, a visitor who cannot see still enters the scent fully, and hears the images described.

Basenote Bitch draws no conclusion about adolescence. It simply sets before us again the objects we once chose to stand for ourselves, and lets the nose do the rest. Elsewhere in the Olfactory Art Keller programme, scent is often the whole work. Here it is the part that answers back.