Ezra Woods

Ezra Woods: Scent and Window Display

Pressetext:

LAXART is pleased to present a new fragrance and window display by Los Angeles based artist Ezra Woods, curated by Aram Moshayedi. Conceived as part of LAXART’s continuing series of projects based in and around the gallery’s office window, Woods’ display and bottled scent collapses the window’s public function with the conventions of commerce. Interacting with the gallery’s exterior, the window is here employed by Woods to target an audience through strategies of advertisement, directing patrons toward a scent designed by the artist located on a shelf at the gallery’s entrance.

In the window, text reading “Please ask the girl at the counter about the perfume” is paired with an image appropriated from Sinead O’Connor’s controversial television appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1992, wherein O’Connor completed her a cappella performance of Bob Marley’s song “War” by tearing a photograph of Pope John Paul II. Woods’ resurrection of this canonical moment in mass cultural history evokes the melancholy and resistance of O’Connor’s original performance, while, like advertisement, further reducing the original provocation to an image.

The bottled scent designed by Woods is made available in the gallery to be taken away on tester strips. As the centerpiece of the site-specific project, the fragrance is both sensorial and conceptual and is not intended for cosmetic purposes. Ingredients are here meant to operate connotatively, employing a symbolic language that refers to base materials and evocations of sorrow and earthy soil. The initial experience of the scent, for example, is derived from indolic white flowers (the chemical compound indole occurs in fragrant white flowers, corpses, and feces) and is meant to elicit bright and operatic sensations; while the scent’s lingering affects are achieved by an agent associated with melancholia that is extracted from the earth in southern India after the season’s first monsoon.

Ezra Woods currently lives and works in Los Angeles. In 2006, he created a scent in collaboration with Jason Rhoades’ Black Pussy. LA>