Canadian artists use scent, instead of paint, to shape their art

Art is political and so is scent. These are the Canadian artists using smell to evoke emotions.

Featured on thestar.com

The smell of pavement when it starts to rain, the pages in an old book, your mother’s perfume — these odours may evoke memories, images flashing in our minds. But then, how to describe them?

“There’s no language for it,” says Jim Drobnick, a critic, curator and associate professor at OCAD University.

“It has a real presence and ephemerality to it.”

Art, for a long time, has focused on the visual, the easiest medium to reproduce and to describe. But technology is starting to solve that problem, Drobnick says.

There are new ways to detect what makes up a smell and to reproduce it, including devices like electronic noses that list the chemicals in, say, a flower. Creating scent is a science that’s also art.

And a handful of trail-blazing artists are exploiting scent to disrupt the ways we’re used to consume art. They’re creating pleasant scents and putrid odours.

Artists explore the politics of space with at times intimidating scents. “People have to breathe ... whereas you can choose not to look at a painting,” he says.

Click here to read the full article and learn about a handful of artistic works that use scent as their medium.