OAK@IAO.

A year, packed up

In February 2022, from the 1st to the 28th, the Institute for Art and Olfaction in Los Angeles opened an exhibition with a name as short as an email address: OAK@IAO. OAK is Olfactory Art Keller, the Manhattan gallery that shows only smells, opened in 2021 by the olfaction scientist Andreas Keller. IAO is the institute for olfactory art in Los Angeles, on Chung King Road in the city's Chinatown.

The show was a selection from the first year of Olfactory Art Keller. The works were drawn from three group exhibitions held in New York: Perfumers Gone Wild, Ten Encounters and New York/New Fumes.

There is something pleasing about this move. Two organisations devoted to olfactory art, on opposite coasts of the United States, one in New York, one in Los Angeles. One sends, one receives. Between them lies a continent, and a question: can a work made of smell travel?

Paintings can be crated. Sculptures can be wrapped. Smell is different. It evaporates, and has to be set again in another room with other air. Each exhibition is the work being born once more.

Perfumers and artists

The list of contributors to OAK@IAO mixes two worlds that rarely meet. On one side are professional perfumers, people who usually work to commissions from perfume brands. Christophe Laudamiel, a master perfumer, showed work from New York/New Fumes. Carlos Benaim, Chiaki Nomura, Irina Adams, Tessa Liebman and Yves Cassar also contributed scents. The title Perfumers Gone Wild says a lot: perfumers let loose from commercial limits.

On the other side are artists who have worked with smell for years. Gayil Nalls, maker of World Sensorium, contributed work from New York/New Fumes. Josely Carvalho brought Suspensio, scented sculptures of blown glass. She received the Sadakichi Award for experimental scent work in 2019 and has spent years on a diary of smells of her own.

M Dougherty made /FOREST BATH, sculptures of mycelium, wax and resin, infused with essential oils. Brian Goeltzenleuchter installed Scents of Exile, scented hand sanitising stations addressing the lives of refugees and immigrants. In February 2022, when the world was still washing its hands constantly because of the pandemic, a sanitising station in a gallery was no strange object. The work can be read as turning that familiar gesture into a question about who counts as clean and who is treated as an outsider.

Young banana, old banana

The most memorable piece may be olFACTORY by Camilla Nicklaus Maurer, a site specific installation with two smells: Young Banana and Old Banana.

The names could not be simpler. But they open something anyone who has left a bunch of bananas on a kitchen counter already knows. A green banana smells almost of grass. A ripe yellow one is sweet. An old one, its skin spotted brown, smells heavy, almost like liquor. The same fruit, a different smell every day.

By separating two of those moments and setting them side by side, Maurer lets the visitor perceive time through the nose. No clock, no photograph. Just two smells and the distance between them.

Perhaps that is also a way to read OAK@IAO as a whole. A year of exhibitions in New York, arriving in Los Angeles, had aged a little. A smell placed in another room, in other air, can hardly be identical to the first time. That does not weaken the work. It only reminds us that smell is a living material, always ripening, always changing, even inside a gallery.