It’s been a treat to visit the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art and have beloved friend and colleague Zoë Ryan, ICA’s Director, show me the first US retrospective of Sissel Tolaas. It is only open for two more weeks, until December 30, so rush there if you want to catch a last whiff! For decades, Sissel has preached the gospel of scent as an extraordinary threshold into memory and into a deeper understanding of the life of cities, individuals, and ecosystems natural and artificial. From the ICA website: ‘For Norwegian-born Sissel Tolaas, smell is a vital yet often overlooked tool for communication, and one she has been exploring through her work for more than three decades. She has devoted her research-based artistic practice to the olfactory rather than the visual or the auditory, thereby appealing to a different type of sensory experience with her projects. As Tolaas has noted, “My nose is more advanced than my eyes.”’ The works in the exhibition touch on macro systems using for instance juxtapositions of natural and synthetic vanilla; objects that act as repository of the scent of places, like Jeju Island in Korea; scents designed for animals and imperceptible to humans; a network of smell emitters, each giving off the smell of earth in a specific location; and a room devoted (and connected in real time) to the Northwest Coast of Norway, with fans emitting its scent, their wind blowing into voile curtains. All pictures mine except the last two, by Emma Lee/WHYY. #sisseltolaas #scentasdesign #ica #scent