Chelsea - March 2006 - sound and scent

This weekend Fura and I explored the Chelsea galleries. We started at Postmasters and wound our way through the district following descriptions we'd marked in Time Out.

Much of the work we most enjoyed came from the ones we chose based on curiosity rather than a sense of who the artist was. The most surprising of these is a scent and light installation by Charlotta Westergren at Bellwether Gallery (134 Tenth Ave).

A 30 second Quicktime of Charlotta Westergren's installation.

The scent was salty and floral and did permeate the space. She had worked with the scent technicians at West International to find a scent that matched her childhood memories of the Swedish Coast. The light in the hallway was red and the bulbs looked old, the space merged into a center room painted all white and diffusely lit so that nothing felt clear - like the soft wash of childhood memories.



At another gallery further uptown we found an odd installation of work the felt drawn from high school boredom sketched on the inside of notebooks and blown to fit the walls of a giant gallery. But some of the elements interested me - like this wobbly skinny impossible arm extending from the wall. It's fist clasped about a cord holding a filled paint bucket just above the floor. The temptation to reach out and swing the bucket was almost impossible to resist. And I found myself wondering if the elements did in fact have the weight they pretended.



Tucked in the back of the gallery, a video portrait of a man and a woman drowned just before you. The two screens focused on two people just below the surface of gently sussurating water. Their eyes blinked and they seemed to be exhaling, no matter how long you looked on.

An 8 second Quicktime of the video portrait.