Artist | Author | Scent Maker | Advocate for the Unconscious
Catherine Haley Epstein is an award-winning artist, designer and curator. Over the past eight years she has pioneered the incorporation of scent into her visual and conceptual art practice. The effect has been an entirely new and more abstract dynamic to her work.
Mixing scent requires chance, knowledge and courage. In this installation, "My Nose Made Me Do It," the artist has combined visuals with which she has been obsessed for over twenty years in the same manner she has combined scent materials - with love patience and curiosity. The installation is a weaving of philosophy, art history and multimedia where scent, visuals, text and sculpture become distilled tales of her nose journey to date.
My Nose Made Me Do It
New Work by Catherine Haley Epstein
Pushdot Gallery, Portland, OR
February 1 - March 26, 2019
Reception for Artist: February 1, 6-8 PM
(from press release)
Catherine Haley Epstein is an award-winning artist, designer and curator. Since 2010 she has pioneered the incorporation of scent into her visual and conceptual art practice. The effect has been an entirely new and more abstract dynamic to her work.
Mixing scent requires chance, knowledge and courage. In this installation, "My Nose Made Me Do It," the artist has combined visuals with which she has been obsessed for over twenty years in the same manner she has combined scent materials - with love patience and curiosity. The installation is a weaving of philosophy, art history and multimedia where scent, visuals, text and sculpture become distilled tales of her nose journey to date.
Most recently Catherine attended the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, and spoke at the Society of Illustrators in New York on her writing and scent practice. She is a multimedia artist and has recently done educational programming around scent at the Portland Art Museum, and with Public Annex, who serves community artists with disabilities. In 2016 she was selected to exhibit her experimental fragrance project at the inaugural AIX Scent Fair at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the 2017 Perfumed Plume Award in Fragrance Journalism, for her writing on the use of scent as an art medium, and has served on the panel for Visual Artist grants for the National Endowment for the Arts.
Notes on images above, as shown top (image 1) to bottom (image 6):
(1) Dasein Track 1: I’m Alive (Sort)
(2) Dasein Track 2: I’m Free (Forget)
(3) Dasein Track 3: The Being (Rhythm)
(4) Dasein Track 4: The Nothing (Say No)
Dasein is a term coined by Martin Heidegger that translates to “being there”, and is his philosophy on personhood and what it means to be a person in the world bound by time and space. I chose images I have an intimate relationship with for over 20 years and bound them together visually. I made countless mixes, just as I do with scent, and share only a few of the final works as their mood fit the context in the space. Mood is another element that Heidegger takes seriously: mood in all of its formations enables our response to the world. Our moods are affected by all the materials and people that surround us.
(5) Homage to Kandinsky and Arp: Concrétion Humaine
In 1912 Wassily Kandinsky and Jean Arp were connected by their obsession of the notion of the spiritual made material. Kandinsky made two-dimensional work and wrote a book about the spiritual and art, and Arp created three-dimensional work in the hopes of conveying pure feeling through material. The two sparked a friendship and for years compared notes about the alchemy of material and the spirit. They called the finished artworks in this vein concrétion humaine. Concretion signifies the process of condensation, hardening, thickening and growing together. They used black and white to create tension in their compositions, where I have used concrete and perfume - the two polar opposite materials in the studio which create the strongest moods. The feeling is one I have had for years as I try to navigate the world of fragrance, the limitations and the endless possibilities inspire me daily.
(6) There Is No Wheel
The landscape of scents is typically and commercially presented as a fragrance “wheel”, and looks like a color wheel. Unlike the color wheel which shows how colors interact with each other, the fragrance wheel illustrates no such functionality. These paint chips were found from the 1950s and 60s American hardware stores. A time of great social unrest where color made a great deal of difference depending on the context. Can scent change given the context, time or words describing it?