Exhaust

2015
interactive installation
dimensions variable

Exhaust is a sensory installation that harnesses the evocative power of scent to address the topic of energy politics. Fluctuating oil and gasoline prices make headlines as the effects of competing factors unfold within a complex system of market forces, domestic and global economies, emerging technologies, class disparity, and the environment. Even experts in these fields are unsure whether or not currently developing economic, political, and ecological considerations will have a lasting adverse impact on a micro or macro scale. This web of interconnected and sometimes conflicting interests, coupled with wildly divergent projections and predictions, has created a miasma of public unease. Exhaust highlights the uncertainty of our current situation and the unsettling ambiguity of the future.

A single odor can operate as an immediate instinctual trigger for pleasure, curiosity, caution, disgust, or even panic. Ambient scent is simultaneously enduring and ephemeral, specific and indefinable, bypassing the constraints of symbolic imagery and language, making it an ideal medium to express that which we know exists on the edge of our consciousness, but just cannot put into words or pictures.

More Information:

• link to article: Interview on NPR's The Sound of Applause
• exhibition photos: opening @ SPACES (8/21/2015)
• process photos: #ExhaustAtSPACES