Basenote Bitch: Verbal Description Tour for Blind Gallery Goers and Their Friends

Olfactory Art Keller will host its first verbal description tour for blind gallery goers and their friends! Led by Leona Godin in conversation with the artist, Elizabeth Renstrom, this access tour of Renstrom's solo exhibition Basenote Bitch is free, but space is limited and registration required.

About Basenote Bitch: Basenote Bitch is a solo exhibition of new fragrant works by Elizabeth Renstrom. Like a first love or a first shame, it’s hard to forget your first scent. Each tends to occur during those heady, hormone-filled teenage years when everything's at once fresh, exciting, awkward and unbearable.

In Basenote Bitch, Renstrom synthesizes the ecstasy and agony of naive self-image, using photography and installation to reflect on all the ways we use fragrance to project and amplify who we once may have wished to be — and perhaps still secretly do. The photographs showcase iconic retro scents —particularly ones beloved by teens across generations — satirized alongside, and contextualized within, still-life homages to the bedroom scenes where they would have been showcased or hidden away in rebellion.

A second and related component of the exhibition will be an interactive installation of objects featured in the photographs and scented with the featured perfumes. An essential extension of the work, this opportunity to spray, sniff and recall anchors attendees in sentimentality and memory in a way that only scent can.

Though the images, objects and scents are clearly fixed in the 80s, 90s and early aughts, the nature of the nostalgia they evoke varies as widely as fragrance does on individual skin. For those who lived through the years: a pang of remembrance. For those younger who may long for idealized days of landlines, dELiA*s and Jonathan Taylor Thomas: a yearning for a type of innocence they never knew and never will.

Image description: “Fahrenheit”: a photo featuring a collection of items arranged on a surface: A can of Budweiser beer on the left, with its classic red label and the Budweiser logo in white; In the center, a bottle of Dior Fahrenheit cologne, which has a gradient design with a clear top that transitions into a red-orange color at the bottom, resembling a sunset; Below the cologne bottle, there is a stack of CDs. The top CD has a blue cover with the "Dave Matthews Band" written in white. The CD below it has a black and white cover with the text "The Best of 1980-1990" by U2; On the right, behind the cologne bottle, is a movie poster of Al Pacino from "Scarface." Al Pacino's face is prominent, with a serious expression, and the title "SCARFACE" is visible in large white letters.