New York/New Fumes
December 16, 2021 to January 28, 2022
Olfactory Art Keller is honored to present recent experimental scents by the new wave of New York-based scent artists. Contributors include trained perfumers as well as visual artists and musicians who creatively engage with scents. Each of the 21 artists contributed a single new scent (or in one case a pair), many of them in unique containers designed by the artist.
Edition of 1; price on request
Clarity
Calder Singer
Edition of 1; price on request
BLACK AND WHITE MAMBO No5
Christophe Laudamiel, 2021 edition 1/1 no artist proof
Scent paraboles, white KPM® original Urbino® porcelain, kaolin, custom KPM-made black enamel, Algae red decolorized, Amber indenofuran, Ambrarome absolute, Ambrocenide®, Arcolyl®, Cassie absolute Egypt, Coumarin, para-Cresyl acetate, artificial Civet, Cuir DM (vegetal), delta-Decalactone, Derambrene super, Dihydro-camphenyl-butanol, Dipropylene glycol, Ethyl linalool, Gaiacol, Gardenia decalone, Ionol, Iracine, Mugane®, Musk tetralin, Myrrh essential oil Somalian, Myrrh resinoid Namibian, gamma-Nonalactone, Noreenal®, Orris absolute ex-personal collection (2.9%), Orris superfluid Co2 extract organic ex-personal collection (2.9%), Oxane, Patchouli absolute molecular distilled decolorized, iso-Propyl myristate, Sandalwood white Quintis (31%), Santamanol®, Sulfurol, Triethyl citrate, gamma-Undecalactone, Vanillin ex-biotechnology, Vertofix® coeur, cables, keys.
The futility of the human brain often transpires when scent and color are confronted simultaneously. One is interpreted in relation to the other, oblivious to other key factors in the equation. We become lame at their mercy.
The smelly bits: you might see splattered milky sandalwood or perhaps a little velvety white peach. The darkness of smoky twigs or is it a bitter stem? a piece of hot metal flying around, or is it leather? Perhaps just a comforting fur and plump lipstick. Is it just me that feels good and composed today? Or is it the parabole that makes me feel unsettling with smoking guns and hot plastic swirling around? It cannot be. Yes it can.
Modus operandi: smell the inside of the lids gently. Sniff eyes open looking at the color black, or white, alternatively. Both paraboles are loaded with the exact same scent.
Replenishing: twice to four times a year or as desired, by dropping 2 drops on each kaolin pebble. Remove the pebbles out of the paraboles and place them on paper towel to do this. Contains non-toxic ingredients, each approved for use in perfumery but wear gloves as the oil is pure concentrate.
Edition of 1; price on request
ANNI
Claudia Bognanni
Life itself.
The brain, the mind, the spirit, the soul; trapped in pain and sadness, darkness.
Odyssey, the healing process,
one of the most difficult journeys.
Search for light,
redemption and acceptance.
Learning to forgive yourself.
The end, the conquer of freedom.
Freedom of the mind.
Freedom of the soul.
You are clouds, haze,
you are in the sky,
you are at peace.
Edition of 1; price on request
Monte Vista 1987-2012
Goldie Poblador
"Monte Vista" titled after the name of the village in Manila, Philippines where the artist grew up, is an encapsulated depiction of the immigrant yearning to return home as told through the scents of Poblador’s childhood. The base oil shares the memory of grating fresh coconut meat to create oil that was used for food and body and is complemented by flora and fauna that can be found in the village. Tobacco, is used to represent the years of rebellion spent in her childhood home and the fondness for a youth long gone. The bottle design is based on a scentless vine like flower that grew along the village’s sign post that also no longer exists.
Edition of 1; price on request
Intimate City/City Intimacy
Tessa Liebman
Intimate City/City Intimacy is an olfactory translation of the ideas and feelings I’ve felt in the last year or two as I’ve encountered humans (and other inhabitants of this city) again after being isolated during the pandemic. I grew up in New York City and have somehow become very accustomed to the forced proximity and involuntary intimacy the city demands. It is something that I think makes New Yorkers so connected, empathetic towards and unfazed by each other in all of our forms, allowing us to move gracefully through spaces and places so densely packed. Many new to New York are shocked and disgusted, delighted, deeply affected by this instant and literal closeness. I felt that reemerging from the pandemic was like a new introduction to this slightly forgotten and very familiar world of nearness; smelling the alcohol on the breath of a fellow subway rider, recalling the fragrance worn by someone queuing up for toilet paper in front of me, brushing past the greasy hair of an exhausted line cook I recognize by their footwear and fingers. This scent and bottle are a collage of this tender and unavoidable interconnectedness. Notes: Base: Labdanum, Birch Tar, Animalis Hypo, Synthetic Civet Absolute Heart: Ylang Ylang, Iso E Super Top: Wild Orange, Rum Ether
Edition of 1; price on request
PORT MORRIS
Darryl Do
Notes:
Iris
Metal
Fir
Galbanum
Smoke
Musk
Earth
###
Edition of 1; price on request
BRICK
Stephen Dirkes ( feat. VandalNYC )
BRICK is an olfactive installation Inspired by the residents of an imagined apartment building on an extremely cold night after the opening of the “New York New Wave” Exhibition at MOMA’s PS1 on February 15th, 1981.
BRICK is New York City slang for very cold weather, as in, “It’s brick out there”. Uniquely New York and an important part of the fabric of our lives, the stuff our homes, schools, offices, shops and streets. Brick is the color of of our landscapes, the texture of our walls, and the canvas for our art.
Energy and excitement is palpable this night, in the shimmering lights of distant skylines, scored by rumbling asphalt, the white noise of a few millions lives, percussive fragments of machines and voices from points unknown, all roughly choreographed humanity in asynchronous altering bustle and repose.
The cold ozonic air of water bound neighborhoods at the end of a long NYC Winter, metal, brick, concrete, paint, plastic, refuse, rot, and alcohol, that fills them, weave the tapestry of this fragrance.
In this installation, I am focused on the outside of this building and it in the landscape of frozen New York which provides its context, more than fragrant notes from the residents.
BRICK FRAGRANCE MATERIALS
3-(1,3-Benzodioxol-5-yl)-2-methylpropanal
1-(3,3-dimethylcyclohexyl)ethyl formate
2-(4- methylphenoxy)ace aldehyde
(2E,6Z)-nona-2,6-dienal
Galbanum
Cornmint
(4S,4aS,8aR)-4,8a Dimethyloctahydronaphthalen-4a(2H)-ol
2-pentylcyclopentan-1-ol
5-butyl-5-ethyloxan-2-one
2,4-dimethyl-2-(5,6,7,8-tetrahydro-5,5,8,8-tetramethyl-2 naphthalenyl)-1,3- dioxolane
(4-methylphenyl) acetate
Birch Tar
2-(3,8-dimethyl-1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8-octahydroazulen-5-yl)propan-2-yl acetate
Myrrh
Coffee
Ginger
Fresh Cut
Emmanuelle Sirois
It’s a break-up with no broken heart; it’s the stable center in the rapid pivot of a La La La Human Step ballet. It’s the spirit that addresses fascism after a needed hiatus from the streets. It’s the song you listen to after tidying your life Marie Kondo-style: clarifying and certainly not melancholic. It’s timeless, beautifully sharp. It’s the way I like to run: Golden hour, mile 5. Starting to get hard.
I won’t lie. I need to slow my heart beat down but keep the same pace. What if I deepen my breathing, cut off the sweat burning muscles, and fill the void with the immense landscape. Oceanic, arboreal, mountainous, it doesn’t matter, it just has to be immense. Can we meditate in action and dissolve in the air? Running teaches patience: train until the power precedes the effort. Running teaches how to hold: a transcendental groove does not require excess, but can be reached through temperance as well. Joy: runners know that running itself is the reward. It’s a little darker, mile 11. The breeze is getting colder but the running is getting easier. I can’t hear the cars anymore; I’m in the park. The breeze is getting colder, colder still, and I’m done running. It is strange to suddenly stop and the only thing I can think of is the smell of the mown grass and how good it feels sometimes to be literal: fresh cut.
Edition of 1; price on request
Infinite Sadness
Liz Wendelbo
Liz Wendelbo is in the electronic music synth duo Xeno & Oaklander whose latest album ‘Vi/deo” was released in October 2021. "Infinite Sadness" is the first song on the album. "Infinite sadness" is also a scent Wendelbo experimented with as she was writing the song. Confined in the studio during lockdown, pipettes and oils lived in symbiosis with music synthesizers, patch cables and video cameras. Online streams were the only form of communication with our music audience. Wendelbo would bless the video broadcast with incense in the room and sprays of perfume as part of the performance. These elements of ritual are apparent in the scent with Angelica, Saffron and Frankincense. Wendelbo was also interested in making Melancholia tangible. She sensed sadness could be turned into an object. She materialized melancholia with the scent of smoke, this purgatory fog. She also read on the history of spices, theories of smell through time, and modernist representations of vibration, so she wanted to give the scent the musty bookish character of oudh mixed with the futuristic feel of lab made molecules such as the iconic Aldehyde C11. Ultimately she was looking for a way to be transported to a more beautiful world with the desire and belief that change is possible.
Edition of 1; price on request
Foodgasm on 14th Street
Irina Adam
One of my favorite things in NYC is trying out foods of various cultures while on my way somewhere. That bakery on 14th street I walked into one day. Their cardamom and saffron buns make the world stand still with one bite, while crowds and traffic zoom by. Through conversations with staff, I learned that the dough gets infused with spices overnight, and that Sweden is the world’s largest consumer of cardamom outside of India where it originates.
In addition to the memory of the scent and taste, this work captures a bit of the texture of the pastry, fluffy and buttery with crispy edges, a sugar glaze, and the sparkle of the spices. Featuring a unique ‘brick oven sourdough’ accord I've been experimenting with, including capturing the smoke of fresh bread.
A moment of pure sensorial transcendence, at your fingertips.
Organic cane alcohol, natural ingredients (beegan.) 50 ml.
Edition of 1; price on request
Bat's Blood Ink
David Seth Moltz
Bat's Bloo Ink draws on the old Hoodoo formulas used in casting dark spells. A bloody accord is matched with aromas of ink and grounded in red spikenard, rose absolute, pepper, and celery. This is the last surviving bottle from an original edition of 3.
Edition of 1; price on request
Morning of Drunkenness
Salvatore Barone
“Oh my good! Oh my beautiful! Appalling fanfare where I do not falter.”
Inspired by Arthur Rimbaud’s poem Morning of Drunkenness, this scent captures the rebirth of debauchery in NYC post-pandemic. Morning after, blurred memories, stranger next to you. Tousled bed sheets that smell of the night before.
The story emerges in three accords: a skin/sex accord built around musks, civit and other animalic notes. A seedy dive bar accord filled with leather, cognac, aged whiskey barrels and sticky woods. The third accord alludes to the faint trail of perfume and cologne lingering within crisp, white sheets: iris, Iso E Super, Ambroxan, Adoxal. This perfume celebrates the return to life, loudness and raunchy encounters that made us fall in love with the city.
“It began with a certain disgust—and it ends,—unable instantly to grasp this eternity,—it ends in a riot of perfumes.”
Edition of 1; price on request
Rae Hsu was interviewed by Gayil Nalls for PLANTINGS. Read the story behind Euglossini cologne here.
Euglossini cologne
Rae Hsu
This fragrance is a speculative rendering of an orchid bee’s aromatic concoction. The only other species known to create perfumes, these creatures travel far distances to gather volatile compounds, scraping scents into pouches on their hind legs. Their scent vocabulary is complex and varied, ranging from flowers, fruits, resin to fungi, feces, decaying wood. During mating season, they spray their perfume into the air via a choreograph of legs and wings movement. To study orchid bees, scientists lure them with scent traps. As a speculative scent rendering, “Euglossini cologne” isn’t a postulation on exactly what an orchid bee perfume smells like, instead, it is a computation of their perfume via the instrumentality of science. In a way, this is an eternal fragrance. When their ecology is dead and the species long gone, this may serve as the only memory of the orchid bee.
Edition of 1; price on request
August 23, 1970
(inspired by a live recording of The Velvet Underground at Max’s Kansas City)
Hannah Marie Marcus
It’s the last recording of Lou Reed with the Velvet Underground; he quit the band after one of the Max’s shows. Max’s was a steakhouse and performance space on Park Avenue South that became a magnet for New York seventies glam. The recording was made on a tabletop cassette deck by Warhol Factory regular Brigid Berlin, and lots of tidbits of stray conversation can be heard above the music. There’s a tension between the in-crowd casual chatter and the performance of the songs, played with a glimmer of defeat to a small audience that was barely listening.
The scent project started out as an archaeological dig into that summer night, but became more of a tribute to Lou Reed himself, who drew his inspiration from the oozing palimpsest of New York – a city that still peels away from itself relentlessly. You’ve gotta take both boots, the salt and the pepper.
The left boot scent is A New Illusion: Steakhouse accord of fresh pickles and black pepper, overheated vacuum tubes, a trampled mylar balloon, something you can’t quite place - and honeysuckle.
The dark material is Here Come The Waves: Scavenging a deserted beach on the Manhattan coast as night approaches – it’s an area that used to be called Madison Park. A gull perches on an old barnacle-covered porcelain toilet bowl that’s resting on the sand. A couple of wild hogs scamper by. You shoo away the gull and take a seat on the bowl, unscrew your wineskin and pour a bit of homemade hooch into a small empty bottle you found half-buried in the sand by your foot. You can’t quite make out the label but it might say, ‘Paco Rabanne – Eau De Calandre.’ You take a swig and look out on the sea.
Edition of 1; price on request
Emergence (an abstraction)
Gayil Nalls
"Emergence (an abstraction)" is about the phenomena of creating chemical knowledge.
Edition of 1; price on request
Liminal
M Dougherty
Liminal is an artifact of the etherial. The physical form and atmospheric characteristics of this work attempt to capture the space without place. It is familiar yet illusive and holds the brilliant sting of the uncanny.
The scent of this work was mixed without notation from the artist. Made entirely in the subjective space, it exist only from that moment, in this form, and will never be recreated.
To create the bottle, the artist 3D modeled the form, printed it in resin, grew crystals around it and preserved them.
Materials: 3D printed resin, glass, crystals, sealant and fragrance materials.
Edition of 1; price on request
NYSE Attar ( aka New York Scent Exchange)
David Falsberg
In 2007 I suffered a severe allergic reaction and was blind for a year. When I was able to see and live again I found that I had acquired an alpha dog sense of smell. Playing with essential oils was a central theme of my return to "normal". Soon I began to make fragrances led by a spirit guide who urges me to choose materials that are both beautiful and at times shocking. People tell me that my fragrances evoke emotional tidal waves in the wearer that can be disturbing at times, joyous at times. NYSE Attar is the perfect expression of our current love of highest grade raw materials, an obsession with oud oils and the return to horizontal perfumery, classic middle eastern perfumery which blends finest raw materials without consideration of top, middle and base notes, all natural and potent. Usually toppy notes like citrus are absent or limited in our current work. An attar is a perfume blend that uses sandalwood as the carrier oil, no alcohol and adheres to horizontal perfumery. NYSE (the New York Scent Exchange) uses some of my most prized materials, the sandalwood is vintage Indian Mysore blended with several Hindi ouds that are at least 15 years old and beautifully aged with just a hint of the original animalic notes typical of ouds from the region. We use a stone soup approach to blending, we lay out a lot of materials that may be perfect for the fragrance we want to build. We do not build from a formula but from our knowledge beforehand of synergistic and antagonistic materials that we apply one oil at a time. In the case of NYSE we started with oud, sandalwood and Siam wood then moved on to florals then spices and resins. After blending the woods we added florals, primarily tuberose and geranium, spices including cinammon and clove, resins such as opopanax and animaiics in the form of two deer musks and hyraceum which we added to the organic alcohol in the perfume months before creating the final blend. Our library of works is a battlefield between overindulgence and minimalism and the overindulgence tends to win the battle though we use tiny amounts of powerful materials to add nuanced facets to the fragrance.
Notes: vintage Mysore sandalwood, Indonesian sandalwood root oil prepped with hyraceum, 3 vintage Indian ouds (2 Assam ouds, 1 Anuchal Pradesh), tuberose fine, geranium, Indian wild grass (ruh khus from White Lotus Aromatics), cinnamon, clove, kastuf attar, White Lotus black pepper, House tincture of juniper berries, lavender, House tincture of vintage wild oud chips with castor sacs, tincture of Persian saffron, Persian rose (the best), legally culled Siberian deer musk and pharmaceutical grade Tibetan deer musk. The musk is a great fixative and cleans and brightens the entire blend.
Edition of 1; price on request
At Home with Fox and Beaver
Miriam Songster
Here in Westchester County, beavers and foxes share their home territory with dogs and humans. The dogs frequently encounter fox or beaver scat, and on especially lucky occasions they find a castoreum-rich beaver scent-mound to lavishly roll in. So when dogs and humans return from a walk, fox and beaver often travel into the house with them.
My dogs seem overjoyed by these smelly encounters, but what they are really feeling and experiencing isn’t accessible to me. If I could drop and roll in poop to find out I probably would, but the exercise would be doomed to failure. “At Home with Fox and Beaver” acknowledges this gulf in olfactory experience. In their encounters with natural fox and beaver products, the dogs are registering a multitude of aroma molecules and, in some dog-like way, processing complex olfactory data. The odors are not distasteful to them, but seem instead to be exciting and informative. In contrast, the scent “At Home with Fox and Beaver” includes only a small subset of the aroma materials produced by foxes and beavers, substantially reducing complexity and allowing for a scent that humans can judge as relatively pleasant.
This gulf in olfactory sensibilities might be a metaphor for the separation that humans have created between themselves and the other animals that we share the planet with. But considering this gulf can also be a step towards better understanding other species and behaving more responsibly towards them. Perhaps we can strive to be at home not just with dogs, but with the foxes and beavers, and all manner of living beings.
Edition of 1; price on request
New Kids
Andy X
The chords of 90s New York City’s nervous system were plucked by vibrantly androgynous fingers. The aesthetically infamous queers, the Club Kids, spent their days in school and work but their nights dancing at local clubs where they were shoving the boundaries of persona, dazzling the youth and frightening the boomers. Though the original group soon had their realm restrained by a combination of scandals, political targeting, and economic roadblocks, their avant-garde influence and innovations continues to reverberate through generations. Today, Gen-Z is burning that same torch which enlightened and heated the nights of the city too many years ago. Now we see an experimental resurgence of the Club Kid philosophy: DIY everything, continuously redefine and reinvent fashion and ultimately beauty; radically expressing self and more importantly connecting with community, all to build and rebuild extravagant worlds unlocked not only at night.
It is now the era of the New Kids.
Edition of 1; price on request
Collective Memory
Eva Petric
Collective Memory is a catalyst for the collective memory reaching all the shadowed emotions within you. Shadows are like memories. We all have them, whether we acknowledge them or not. Both are ungraspable; appearing and disappearing they often trick us. Stemming from my periodic table of shadowed emotions my Stem Cell figure shows that we are like the threads in it, caught into loops of emotions. So don’t leave your emotions in the shadows, instead, tune into them and be in tune with our collective memory! My Collective Memory fragrance was inspired by my shadow photograph figure from my Gr@y Matter – language of shadows series, translated into handmade Idrija lace and engraved by me into my once upon a time grandmother’s fragrance bottle, now yours’s to discover.
Edition of 1; price on request
Prediction 1.1
Jeanette Andrews
This bottle contains a scent you will think of in the future, (you just don’t know what it is yet) already created and bottled here.
Will it match your thought?
If you purchase this bottle you will be invited to partake in a bespoke performance completing this work.