“Olfactory Ecologies and Contemporary Art” will be discussed during a Santa Barbara Museum of Art talk July 7.
“Olfactory Ecologies and Contemporary Art” will be Hsuan L. Hsu’s topic at the Art Matters Lecture at 5:30 p.m. July 7 in the Mary Craig Auditorium at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St.
The speaker is a professor of English at UC Davis.
Although the sense of smell has long been marginalized in the Western aesthetic tradition, contemporary artists have been experimenting with olfactory materials purported to act on breathers on a visceral level, entering and biochemically transforming their bodies, minds and moods.
Focusing on artwork by Peter De Cupere, Boris Raux, Anicka Yi, Renée Stout and Tanaïs, this talk considers three ways of framing scent as a medium of environmental knowledge and intimacy: as a vehicle for communicating environmental toxicity, as an intoxicating and intimate form of human and more-than-human communication and as a way of making public “smellscapes” more breathable and meaningful for people and communities whose olfactory experience has been attenuated by Western projects of deodorization and olfactory consumption.
Admission is free for students and museum circle members, $10 for nonmembers and $15 for the general public. They are available at tickets.sbma.net.
Visitors who plan to attend the event must show proof of being fully vaccinated with a booster (if eligible) or, in some cases, supply a negative COVID-19 medical test result taken within 72 hours before the event, along with an official photo ID, before entering the venue.
All visitors must also follow SBMA’s mask policy and wear a mask while attending events in SBMA’s Mary Craig Auditorium.
email: mmcmahon@newspress.com
